‘Army of the Dead’ is a gleefully gory good time

There is nothing subtle about Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead. That is both its strength and its weakness and sometimes, somehow, both at once.

It opens on a group of soldiers calling themselves the “Four Horsemen” and carrying an apocalyptic payload, which is unleashed once their vehicle crashes into a dude getting road head from his new bride. One bloody thing leads to another, and the hot-pink opening credits play over a montage of zombie showgirls rampaging through the casinos, of military planes carpet-bombing the Strip, of muscled warriors taking out the undead by slicing them, squashing them, and riddling them with bullets until they’re reduced to pulp — all set to the soundtrack of a Liberace impersonator singing “Viva Las Vegas.” 

It’s a hell of a way to kick off a film: funny and mean and gleefully gory, but also ruthlessly efficient in its place-setting. In just a few short minutes, Army of the Dead gets us up to speed on the present state of its post-disaster universe, where the entire city of Las Vegas has been abandoned,  walled off, and left for the dead to take over. 

It’s a hell of a way to kick off a film: funny and mean and gleefully gory, but also ruthlessly efficient.

But the movie that follows doesn’t always seem to know what direction it wants to take its adrenaline-pumping splendor. It’s a heist film that never quite feels zippy enough, undergirded by emotional beats that don’t quite land, and dusted with dramatic potential it never quite lives up to. For all its monstrous beauty — and Snyder knows his way around a painstakingly crafted slow-motion tableau — Army of the Dead feels hollow at its core.

Which isn’t to say it’s not entertaining. Dave Bautista stars as Scott, a seasoned but troubled zombie killer who’s hired by a shady billionaire (Hiroyuki Sanada) to slip inside the contaminated city and retrieve a fortune from a casino vault. Scott gets to recruit his own team, and like the dutiful movie character he is, he stocks them with instantly understandable cinematic archetypes: the no-nonsense veteran (Omari Hardwick), the cigar-chomping pilot (Tig Notaro), the oddball safecracker (Matthias Schweighöfer), even a tough lady in a red bandana (Samantha Win) a la Aliens. 

(This won’t be the last time Army of the Dead borrows from that James Cameron classic — another last-minute addition to the team is a slimy corporate overseer, played by Garret Dillahunt.) 

Once they get in, with help from a jaded coyote (Nora Arnezeder, a standout in the ensemble cast), they find no shortage of excuses for graphic kills and lavish set pieces. Taken in individual chunks, much of it is pretty great: While there are a couple sequences that feel like watching someone else play a video game on easy mode, there’s also a tense creep through a dark room packed with hibernating zombies, and a clever experiment with some extra-gruesome booby traps. Even some of the overwritten comedic banter works, particularly when it’s being traded between the reluctant odd couple of Hardwick and Schweighöfer.

The trouble comes when Army of the Dead tries to move beyond surface pleasures. The film’s emotional through line concerns Scott’s inability to forgive himself for a traumatic incident in which he had to kill his own infected wife in front of his daughter, Kate (Ella Purnell). But the film lumbers through those beats like an undead “shambler” after fresh meat. There’s no finesse to the scenes where he and others just spell out what they’re thinking, and the film’s attempt to add some personality to their relationship via an ongoing in-joke about a food truck falls flat because — as reliably charismatic as Bautista is even in strong, silent stock hero mode — neither Scott nor Kate have much of a personality to begin with. 

Still less attention is paid to the intricacies of the zombie mythology established in the movie. We learn quickly that there are two types of zombies: the usual slow-walking, brain-dead ones, and then a more elite class of fast-moving ones who are capable of emotional connection and complex thought, and appear to have formed their own culture complete with community leaders, a social hierarchy, and established traditions and rituals around consumption and creation. 

It’s an idea with intriguing implications, both narrative and thematic. Another movie might have gone down these paths: digging into the hows and whys of this zombie society, challenging Scott’s plans with shocking twists, embracing the zombies as a metaphor for dehumanization and fear of the other (or whatever). But Army of the Dead only nods in those directions while sticking doggedly to the main road, perhaps saving those rabbit holes for the already announced franchise extensions.

Whatever the reason, the choice leaves Army of the Dead feeling a bit timid, despite its no-holds-barred violence, twisted sense of humor, and unflagging dedication to showing you cool-looking stuff at every turn. Maybe that’s not entirely for the worse. A more nuanced Army of the Dead might have had a harder time delivering the lizard-brain pleasures of watching an ostensible hero smash in (a dead) someone’s head or a mustache-twirling villain get mauled by a zombie tiger, and that’s precisely where Army of the Dead shines brightest. It’s mindless fun — no more, and no less.

Army of the Dead begins streaming on Netflix May 21 after opening in theaters May 14.