Army Of The Dead

2021 Netflix

Rated: R

Length: 2 hr 28min

Action ~ Crime ~ Horror ~ Thriller

Starring: Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Ana de la Reguera, Theo Rossi, Matthias Schweighöfer, Nora Arnezeder, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tig Notaro, Raúl Castillo, Huma Qureshi, and Garret Dillahunt.

“There’s two hundred million dollars sitting in a vault in the basement of my Casino in the quarantine zone of Las Vegas. Assemble a team and extract it and 50 million of it is yours. What do you say?”

A zombie outbreak in Las Vegas, Nevada has prompted the US Military to surround the City with three layers of shipping containers, effectively containing (Pun Intended) the Zombie outbreak from temporarily spreading. Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) owns a casino on The Strip inside the containment (Again…Pun intended) zone and is asking Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) to assemble a team of mercenaries to extract the money in exchange for 50 million of it. They just have to kill their way through all the zombies in the quarantine zone, make their way to the casino, crack the Götterdämmerung safe, extract the money, revive and repair the dilapidated helicopter on the roof of the casino, and fly away to safety before the military nukes the quarantine zone in 96 hours. Let’s get cracking(Pun Intended).

Scott agrees and assembles a team to execute the mission. The last man they recruit for the team is none other than our good friend Sebastian (Matthias Schweighöfer) from ARMY OF THIEVES. The scene where Scott finds him in the locksmith shop is the very last scene in ARMY OF THIEVES. And Sebastian is ecstatic about getting a chance to crack the Götterdämmerung safe, after having cracked the Rheingold, The Valkyrie and The Siegfried safes in the other movie. So Scott and his team gather and enter the Zombie zone of Los Angeles to extract two million dollars in what looks like a horrific suicide mission. Scott must also contend with his daughter who has forced herself onto the mission against his wishes.

It is everything you would expect from a zombie movie based in Las Vegas. There are lots of Zombies…..Elvis impersonators, waitresses, circus performers, dancers, police officers….even Siegfried and Roy’s Tiger has become a zombie tiger. Anyone and anything in the quarantine zone is now a zombie. There is lots of blood and gore as they eat the flesh of the living and even more as the team slaughters there way through the Las Vegas Strip. It is very realistically shot, you feel like you are in Las Vegas with them as they fight off the horde. There is intrigue, horror, double crossing and the very real fear of getting eaten alive and escaping before a nuclear bomb incinerates the crew.

Matthias reprising his role as Sebastian is just as good and hilarious as in ARMY OF THIEVES. Dave Buatista is good as Scott Ward and the rest of the crew did a good job. I liked Omari Hardwick’s role and the scene in the end with him I thought was really good. Theo Rossi is really despicable as the sexist Burt Cummings. This was the sequel to Army of Thieves even though this movie came out six months before it. It was supposed to be the beginning of a franchise, possibly a trilogy or more, but at the time of this writing Netflix has apparently pulled the plug on any more movies to follow, reportedly due to the disappointing performance of Zack Snyder’s REBEL MOON movies. ARMY OF THE DEAD was a successor to Zack Snyder’s 2004 film Dawn of the Dead, which was a remake of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (filmed in Pittsburgh and released in 1978).

I thought that ARMY of THIEVES was the better movie. This one was good but just not as good. A long one too, coming in at 2 and a half hours. If you like Zombie movies it’s a good one, well filmed and directed. And if you’re going to watch this one I suggest watching ARMY of THIEVES first, it will give you a better background for this movie. Unless you just want to watch a Zombie movie….but there are zombies in the first one, just not as many.

So that’s a, “Yeah, it was alright. But I wouldn’t watch it again.”, for me…..

No thumbs up, just a wave of the hand as in…So~So