Army of the Dead

Directed by Zack Snyder, Army of the Dead follows a ragtag group of mercenaries, including Dave Bautista’s Scott, Tig Notaro’s Peters, and Garret Dillahunt’s Martin, as they infiltrate a zombie-infested Las Vegas to retrieve $200 million from a casino vault. Filmmaker Snyder, working from a script written with Shay Hatten and Joby Harold, delivers a mostly watchable (albeit thoroughly erratic) endeavor that fares best in its briskly-paced first and third acts, as the movie, which runs a palpably overlong 148 minutes (!), suffers from a padded-out midsection that’s been suffused with a whole host of rather pointless digressions and subplots – with, especially, the continuing emphasis on the so-called “alpha” zombies hardly as interesting or compelling as Snyder has obviously intended. There is, as such, little doubt that large swaths of Army of the Dead suffer from a let’s-get-on-with-it-already sort of vibe, and yet it’s equally apparent that the picture boasts its fair share of engrossing sequences and an assortment of better-than-expected performances – with, in terms of the latter, Bautista’s impressively compelling turn as the reluctant hero anchoring the proceedings through its less-than-captivating stretches. (Dillahunt steals his scant scenes as the crew’s sketchy escort, to be sure.) By the time the action-packed final stretch rolls around, Army of the Dead has cemented its place as a decent zombie thriller that generally does feel like it could and should have been so much better.

**1/2 out of ****