Undead Elvises, topless zombie showgirls, flesh eaters chainsawed in half and "Viva Las Vegas" on the soundtrack: Everything you could possibly want out of a Las Vegas-set Zack Snyder zombie apocalypse romp is right there in "Army of the Dead's" riotous opening minutes.
Sadly, the high doesn't last. "Army of the Dead" eventually settles into a rut and stays there for most of its absurdly long two-and-a-half hour running time, and it never regains the carefree, slapdash, let's-rock energy of its opening. They say with Vegas you should leave before you overstay your welcome. The same goes with "Army of the Dead."
That promising opening introduces us to our main players, chiefly Scott Ward (hulking mass of flesh Dave Bautista) and Maria Cruz (Ana de la Reguera), who spent the Las Vegas zombie apocalypse amassing a massive body count of walking dead.
Now it's several months later and they're just barely scraping by, their glory days of slaying zombies leading back to menial day jobs. Meanwhile, the Vegas strip has been quarantined off and the government is set to nuke what's left of it. Viva Las Vegas no longer.
But before the blast, wealthy businessman and casino owner Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) comes to Scott with a plan: there's $200 million stored inside a vault in his casino. If he can gather a team to get it out, he gets to divvy up his cut of the cash whatever way he sees fit.
Scott puts together a crack crew, including a zombie killing specialist (Omari Hardwick), a safe cracker (Matthias Schweighofer), a sharpshooter (Raúl Castillo) and a helicopter pilot (Tig Notaro, replacing the ousted Chris D'Elia) to pull off the job. Scott's estranged daughter Kate (Ella Purnell) tags along for the trek, as does Tanaka's security chief (Garret Dillahunt) to watch over the gang.
So what we have is a heist movie wrapped inside of a zombie movie, a humdinger of an idea, but it turns out the "Ocean's 11" meets "Dawn of the Dead" premise is a little too good to be true. Just as things are set to get cooking they screech to a halt, as we're introduced to Scott and Kate's daddy-daughter issues (turns out they haven't talked a whole lot since Kate's mom turned into a zombie and Scott jammed a knife in her brain), Kate's humanitarian efforts to track down a family in need inside the quarantine zone and some meticulous, drawn-out bits of zombie mythology involving a zombie queen and her minions. At least there's a zombie tiger, which is pretty cool.
Snyder, at least, is well-attuned to the material: back before he was the hero savior of the online #ReleasetheSnyderCut movement or even the guy who minted Gerard Butler's career with "300," Snyder helmed 2004's hyper-kinetic "Dawn of the Dead" reboot, which introduced the world to fast zombies and kicked off an undead craze that continues to this day.
Snyder, who also co-wrote and shot "Army of the Dead," loves himself some splatter, and he splashes plenty of blood and gore across the screen. But the humor of the opening moments quickly dissipates and with it so does the story's momentum, which is to be expected when the movie unfolds over the same runtime as "Goodfellas." (It goes without saying that this, good friends, is no "Goodfellas.")
"Army of the Dead" does have its moments, however, and with some paring down it could be a lean, mean, zombie heist machine. Here's an idea: cut the fat and bring it in at 90 minutes. That would be a Snyder Cut worth the fuss.
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'ARMY OF THE DEAD'
Grade: C
Rated R (for strong bloody violence, gore and language throughout, some sexual content and brief nudity/graphic nudity)
Running time: 2 hours, 28 minutes
Playing: Now in theaters, on Netflix May 21
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