Army of the Dead

I know that swearing at Zack Snyder is in vogue now, but remember, track pants were in vogue once, too. For me, Army of the Dead is a completely hassle-free, fun action film with a team of characters who are or less, let's say, equal to the team from Aliens, and it has an interesting story that doesn't make things easy for those characters at all. Ever since the opening credits sequence, which Snyder does great, the film had me in the palm of its hand and didn't let me go. It looks great, it sounds great (I want a complete soundtrack, even a song soundtrack), it's fun and it was more than good enough for me. Only the big screen was missing from it being perfect - man, how great would Army of the Dead be in the movie theater!? (22/05/2021)

I don't understand what happened to Zack Snyder, a guy who has the brilliant Watchmen and the very good Man of Steel in his filmography and never really burned out creatively until now, to make shit like this. Pathetic, fucking boring and visually repulsive (no, the juicy opening credits and those few Las Vegas green screens don't cut it). It has only one decent action scene – the casino shootout – which doesn't come until half an hour before the end, and one single noteworthy idea, which is the zombie tiger. And leading the uninteresting ensemble of actors is Dave Bautista, whose acting limits end somewhere near Hamáček's abilities when he talks about his disguise maneuver. (24/05/2021)

After Sucker Punch, it was said that Zack Snyder should not have written his own screenplays. After this movie, however, it will be said that he should not have written his own screenplays, however, more importantly, he should never get behind the camera again! Army of the Dead is an incredible piece of crap, and a movie so visually boring and hideous, that the lack of visual stimulation makes one wonder about the logic behind all the action in the movie, and it is a disaster. It makes no sense at all, the characters are terribly written, the storylines are left unfinished, the attempts at humor are just not funny, and any attempt at drama does not work. I also did not feel any sort of horror at all. If I give this turgid crap any credit at all, perhaps the only thing is that even with its unnecessarily overlong length, it never gets boring, something is constantly happening. However, at the same time nothing really happens that would drive you crazy. So, those are the damn few positives for a movie maker who years ago gave us one of the best zombie horror movies of the new century. Today, unfortunately, he is a parody of himself. (08/06/2021)

So sloppy, it's like nobody was trying very hard with Army of the Dead. The characters are so uninteresting that I didn't care what order they died in, the actors have no charisma or nothing to work with, and the first really interesting and entertaining action scene3 doesn't come until sometime at the beginning of the last quarter. Once they start shooting and slashing properly, it's quite fun, with Snyder keeping himself in check, so there aren't nearly enough of those slow-motion sequences to make it boring, it's just that there's about an hour of completely unnecessary ballast that is boring, where the most entertaining thing is how it all makes no sense at all. Sure, in a B-action flick, that shouldn't really matter, it's just that Army of the Dead may be a B-movie, but it really isn’t. There's climactic brutality , it only falls into the horror category because there are zombies. And Snyder's playing with the camera, which often leads to ugly visuals full of out-of-focus shots (which was supposedly the artistic intent), is more annoying than effective. I don't know. An hour after the closing credits, I can recall virtually nothing of it. Just that I was expecting a lot more than another routine Netflix movie, and I really didn't have those expectations particularly high. An unimaginative and boring waste of time. (21/05/2021)

Someday when the dictionary entry for "biggest film blunder" is written, there will be a photo of Zack Snyder. All the pompous slow-motion, the emotional ping-pong of hollow figures and the over-the-top brutality reveal the naked truth. The guy's a pure directorial dickhead. And although he can refocus like he has ADHD, he really can't hide the stupidity. (27/05/2021)