ARMY OF THE DEAD

VIVA LAS SPOILERAS!

Back in 2004, Zack Snyder did the unthinkable: firstly he remade George Romero's Dawn Of The Dead, the greatest zombie movie of all time and a longstanding personal favourite, and secondly he made a decent fist of it. It's not as good as the original, sure, but as a straight-up nasty zombie movie that stuck with its 18 certificate and didn't wimp out for the teen market, it was good blood-drenched fun. Now Snyder has returned to the undead for the epic Army Of The Dead and frankly he can make as many of these as he likes because he's much more suited to zombies than superheroes.

Don't misunderstand: this isn't a masterpiece. It absolutely doesn't need to be a hundred and forty eight minutes long and could do with a serious trim. It doesn't have the heart or emotional punch of Train To Busan, which achieved so much more in half an hour less, and it doesn't give you much in the way of characters to care about. After a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas, military badass-turned-burger flipper Dave Bautista is hired to assemble a team to break through the city's quarantine walls to remove millions from a casino vault. But there's more to the zombies than just the shambling undead and they'll need more than mere firepower to get through before the US military drop a nuclear bomb on it all...

Why the nuclear strike? Because it's the only way to be sure. What's really surprising about Army Of The Dead is that the chief reference point isn't a zombie movie anyway, but James Cameron's Aliens. Lines of dialogue like "you don't see them f***ing each other over" are too close to be coincidental, Garret Dillahunt's clearly treacherous "security man" is Carter Burke in all but name, and there's a climactic moment on a rooftop that's way over the line of respectful homage and actually detracted from the intended effect because of the obviousness of the moment. And it's a pity because there's a lot to admire in it and a lot to enjoy. This is a zombie movie that includes both varieties of cinema zombies: the slow shufflers and the fast leapers. It portrays some of them as thinking, communicating, planning, leading. It even posits the idea of zombie animals as well as humans, a curious omission from the bulk of zombie cinema thus far (although it's not massively surprising that there does exist a film called Zombie Shark).

If all you want is a bog-standard, 100% generic Las Vegas cheapo zombie movie, there's always the thunderously unremarkable Steve Niles' Remains. But Army Of The Dead is leagues ahead of that. Much of the film is a lot of fun, impressively mounted on a huge scale with a lot of CG and action sequences, even though many of them are an extended series of balletic slo-mo bullets to the undead heads. Characters are delineated enough that you could probably lose a goodly chunk of the early setup sequences, and there are agreeably grisly fates for some of the less sympathetic (and in one case downright despicable) members of the crew. On the other hand Tom Holkenborg's score adds absolutely nothing - the most memorable soundtrack cue is a Richard Cheese version of Viva Las Vegas over the opening credit sequence, and relistening to some of Holkenborg's music through YouTube was turned off pretty quickly - and the CGI does reach overload level on more than one occasion.

I've never been much of a fan of Zack Snyder's films. I liked Dawn Of The Dead and 300 but his superhero movies were terrible, and I've no interest in the Snyder Cut of a film that (whilst acknowledging the personal tragedy that led him to drop out) wasn't much good in the first place and which he's now extended to four hours, drained all the colour out and reconfigured to 4:3 to better fit a screen shape that hardly any of us are ever going to see it in. It's pretty empty, sure, but it's not as creepily sexualised as the even emptier Sucker Punch and it's not as tiresomely glum as Man Of Steel or Dawn Of Justice. But I enjoyed it a lot, I had a lot more fun with it than I was expecting and I wouldn't even be averse to watching it again. (Plus, there's always the hope that if Zack Snyder can confound expectations after a recent string of uninteresting films and come up with something better, maybe other similarly overblown but hollow directors like McG and Michael Bay can as well....?)

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