Army of the Dead

Considering its wildly creative premise, Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead plays things surprisingly safe on the visual and storytelling fronts.

Written by Snyder with Shay Hatten (John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum) and Joby Harold (King Arthur: Legend of the Sword), the director’s first non-superhero film in a decade involves a team recruited for a bank heist inside no less than a walled off, zombie-filled Las Vegas, while the clock ticks before a nuke is dropped on Sin City to end the crisis and celebrate Independence Day.

Despite the pulpy details, some impressive carnage, another strong performance by Dave Bautista as the crew’s leader, and creative mythology about these particular undead, the action-packed proceedings are bereft of scares and stylistic flair. At just shy of 2.5 hours, it’s also a bit of an endurance test, one bogged down by repetitive fight scenes and, beyond a few choice lines courtesy of comic-relief safecracker Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer), mind-numbing dialogue.

And while Army of the Dead never comes close to matching the zombie highs of Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, it refreshingly lacks the self-importance of his DCEU efforts and suggests a potential return to the entertainment-first focus of his early work. If he had to get his Justice League out of his system to get back on track, so be it.

Grade: C-minus. Rated R. Now playing at the Carolina Cinemark. Available to stream starting May 21 via Netflix

(Photo: Netflix)