Army of the Dead is a fun zombie heist movie by director Zack Snyder. A team of mercenaries is sent into Las Vegas to kill some zombies and to retrieve a bunch of cash from a casino vault. Here are the best and worst things about this movie.

The 4 Best Things About the Movie

#1 The movie has a lot of fun action scenes that are set in a Las Vegas that was overrun by zombies. There are even different types of zombies. Some zombies are smart and fast, some are dumb and slow. The setting and the different zombie types keep the action scenes fresh and the plot interesting. Expect less of a horror movie and more of a stylized action movie though.
#2 The cast around Dave Bautista who played Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy is doing a pretty decent job. The characters might be a bit cartoony but have interesting personalities that totally worked for me. The Safecracker was especially interesting to watch.
#3 The president of the United States is quoted by a news anchor saying that nuking Las Vegas on the 4th of July would be really cool and actually kind of patriotic if you think about it.
#4 It’s one of the few bigger releases in the past 12 months.

The 4 Worst Things About the Movie

#1 The movie has some jarring script issues. I’m not talking about plot holes and the power of hindsight here – I’m talking about really confusing stuff. Some of the characters seem to be able to just jump around between locations. The main antagonist was even able to keep up with a helicopter on foot at some point. The amount of money that was supposed to be transported weighs around 2 metric tons – that is way more than what a couple of backpacks can handle.
#2 A lot of things were set up that never really paid off. The movie heavily teased the usage of a giant circular saw to fight off the zombies but we never really got to see it. The protagonists even talked about some dried up zombies that get reactivated by rain but we didn’t get to see this either. This leads me to believe that Zack Snyder tried to do another 4h movie but somebody at the studio put their foot down forced some cuts. This felt especially frustrating right at the end of the movie where the fate of one character was not even mentioned.
#3 There was this one scene were a character died and everybody else just stood there like a deer in the headlights. They clearly could have done something about it. The character alone killed like 20 zombies and the whole team collectively decided no to help her against five more. It was just baffling.
#4 The movie played around with a very shallow depth of field. This led to a lot of very blurry scenes that were sometimes completely out of focus. This is an unaltered still from the movie.

The Conclusion

The movie is around 2h 20min long and was a fun time overall. The script had a couple of jarring issues and could have used some more work but you get pretty much what you expect from this Zack Snyder movie. There were a lot of stylized action scenes that felt similar to his previous movies like 300 or Justice League. If you like to see a bunch of zombies getting killed and if you are a bit more forgiving about the script you are going to have a good time.

4/5 – Hope this helps.