Army of the Dead

Ein kolossaler Trash mit nervigen Figuren und einem geschmacklosen unscharfen Hintergrund. Der Film behält aber die Aufmerksamkeit des Publikums, weil in ihm genug "pleasing" Dinge für die Fans des Genres passieren. Das verlegene Erlebnis der Zuschauer*innen retten auch Bautista, der nicht nur ein muskelbepackter Kerl, sondern auch eine echte Persönlichkeit ist, und der Zombie-Tiger, für den das süße Tier von Ang Lee ein Häppchen wäre! (03.08.2021)

I don't understand what happened to Zack Snyder, a guy who has the brilliant Watchmen and the very good Man of Steel in his filmography and never really burned out creatively until now, to make shit like this. Pathetic, fucking boring and visually repulsive (no, the juicy opening credits and those few Las Vegas green screens don't cut it). It has only one decent action scene – the casino shootout – which doesn't come until half an hour before the end, and one single noteworthy idea, which is the zombie tiger. And leading the uninteresting ensemble of actors is Dave Bautista, whose acting limits end somewhere near Hamáček's abilities when he talks about his disguise maneuver. (24.05.2021)

I think I could enjoy a stupidly scripted zombie horror B-movie, but in this case most of my disappointment stems from the fact that there was no ambition whatsoever to make anything resembling horror. The tone is just overstuffed action nonsense that happens to feature zombies, and I was also surprised at how ugly it looks in many sequences. Moreover, such a banal film, which narratively and conceptually does not bring anything original and interesting, cannot be two and a half hours long for God's sake! You could throw away 45 minutes without any problem. Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead is on another league and I’m afraid we will never see anything like it again from Zack. (26.05.2021)

So sloppy, it's like nobody was trying very hard with Army of the Dead. The characters are so uninteresting that I didn't care what order they died in, the actors have no charisma or nothing to work with, and the first really interesting and entertaining action scene3 doesn't come until sometime at the beginning of the last quarter. Once they start shooting and slashing properly, it's quite fun, with Snyder keeping himself in check, so there aren't nearly enough of those slow-motion sequences to make it boring, it's just that there's about an hour of completely unnecessary ballast that is boring, where the most entertaining thing is how it all makes no sense at all. Sure, in a B-action flick, that shouldn't really matter, it's just that Army of the Dead may be a B-movie, but it really isn’t. There's climactic brutality , it only falls into the horror category because there are zombies. And Snyder's playing with the camera, which often leads to ugly visuals full of out-of-focus shots (which was supposedly the artistic intent), is more annoying than effective. I don't know. An hour after the closing credits, I can recall virtually nothing of it. Just that I was expecting a lot more than another routine Netflix movie, and I really didn't have those expectations particularly high. An unimaginative and boring waste of time. (21.05.2021)

Wenn eines Tages der Wörterbucheintrag für "größter Filmfehler" geschrieben wird, wird ein Foto von Zack Snyder dabei sein. All die pompösen Zeitlupen, das emotionale Ping-Pong der hohlen Figuren und die übertriebene Brutalität enthüllen die nackte Wahrheit. Der Typ ist ein reines Regie-Arschloch. Und er kann auf ADHS umpolen, doch er kann seine Dummheit nicht wirklich verbergen. (27.05.2021)

An unreasonably overblown runtime and a quantum of Snyder’s love it or hate it style in a solid (read through and through bland) unacknowledged adaptation of “Dead Rising 2”. It actually works quite well as a tired C-rated video game adaptation, but not so well as a zombie heist B-movie that plays with the rules of the genre. It undeniably has its strong moments and scenes (marred by shaky camerawork), but there are fewer than one would expect from the self-proclaimed king of "tinsel cool" on a project where he had a free hand. (21.05.2021)

Unfuckingbelievable things comes true and I'm excited like never before! Since World War Z and Train to Busan, there hasn't been a more epic zombie flick, and if someone can't appreciate it, they're an ungrateful cold swine and have become my number one enemy! Zack Snyder evolves zombies into intelligent, fast, and organized bad ass assholes, and I swallowed it all up and sold myself to him like a €20 prostitute at a train station. Zack Snyder gets completely unleashed chains with a pumped-up opening, undoubtedly the best zombie opening in the history of cinema, followed by an entertaining introduction to the characters and the recruiting of the team members. No character is superfluous and the viewer cares about each of them. Matthias Schweighöfer may not be another Kano, but he handles the humor cleverly, the zombie make-up effects are amazing, the action is uncompromising and grand. Zack Snyder takes gore to the next level, and there may not have been a bigger carnage in horror since Evil Dead. I also have to praise the music and the occasionally unpleasant atmosphere (walking among hibernating zombies is downright beautifully horrifying, and I was reminded of Silent Hill). The fight with the tiger is the best animal attack since The Revenant! And the finale crushes balls like nothing in a long time, I was literally experiencing heart attack states. There are also plenty of interesting and innovative ideas here like zombie animals, intelligent zombies that know martial-arts, hibernating zombies, a zombie heist, pregnant zombies, and the traps in front of the vault. Of course, according to local ratings, people naively expected twists like in Game of Thrones and cry over how stupid, action-packed, brutal, and stylish it is. Well, I would prefer to lock them up in a pen among other sheep so they can watch another drama, preferably about a black lesbian, a woman of the 21st century, a vegan, a superior feminist, an influencer visiting Starbucks and swiping on Tinder in the evenings, with a son addicted to drugs and facing murder charges. Oh, that would surely be a more fulfilling experience. Hopefully, another great zombie film will come out in another six years. If Father 2 comes out before the sequel to this, I will vomit fire. 10/10. (21.05.2021)

You should listen to Daddy! A perverse action B-movie that is pleasant to watch, despite its length. As most Netflix productions, it stays somewhere half-way between cinema and TV. Snyder blew logic to smithereens (nuked it) and in the end they no longer even try to explain anything. Maybe he just skimped the job. He simply presents what he finds cool and you just have to take it or leave it. The zombie tiger, walking through the traps, the totally over-the-top ending in the helicopter. The disco. (24.05.2021)

I know that swearing at Zack Snyder is in vogue now, but remember, track pants were in vogue once, too. For me, Army of the Dead is a completely hassle-free, fun action film with a team of characters who are or less, let's say, equal to the team from Aliens, and it has an interesting story that doesn't make things easy for those characters at all. Ever since the opening credits sequence, which Snyder does great, the film had me in the palm of its hand and didn't let me go. It looks great, it sounds great (I want a complete soundtrack, even a song soundtrack), it's fun and it was more than good enough for me. Only the big screen was missing from it being perfect - man, how great would Army of the Dead be in the movie theater!? (22.05.2021)

Nachdem Sucker Punch herauskam, wurde gesagt, dass Zack Snyder keine eigenen Drehbücher schreiben sollte. Nach diesem Film wird man sagen, dass er nicht nur keine eigenen Drehbücher schreiben sollte, sondern vor allem nie wieder hinter die Kamera treten sollte! Army of the Dead ist eine unglaubliche Schmiererei und der Film ist so langweilig und hässlich, dass man aufgrund des Mangels an visuellen Reizen über die Logik des gesamten Geschehens im Film nachdenken muss. Und das ist dann eine Katastrophe. Es ergibt überhaupt keinen Sinn, die Charaktere sind schrecklich geschrieben, die Handlungsstränge bleiben unvollständig, die Versuche, witzig zu sein, sind nicht witzig und die Versuche, Drama zu inszenieren, funktionieren nicht. Ich habe überhaupt keine Versuche bemerkt, Horror darzustellen. Wenn man diesem angeberischen Müll etwas Gutes abgewinnen kann, dann höchstens, dass er trotz seiner überflüssig langen Dauer niemals langweilig wird, es passiert immer etwas und gleichzeitig passiert nichts, was einen wirklich ärgert. Aber das sind verdammt wenige positive Punkte, wenn man bedenkt, dass er uns vor einigen Jahren einen der besten Zombie-Horrorfilme des neuen Jahrhunderts beschert hat. Heute ist er leider eine Parodie seiner selbst (08.06.2021)

Dave Bautista may not be an excellent actor, but I love watching movies with him. His acting strongly reminds me of my favorite 80s and 90s action heroes. I’m not exactly thrilled about this particular movie, though. What I liked best were the opening credits scenes (ruined for me by the terrible version of Viva Las Vegas). If the filmmakers went for zombie carnage with the occasional humor that I was expecting, it probably would have worked. However, they decided to throw in a heist, a completely misguided romantic line (which I couldn’t get my head around), and drowned everything in melodrama. The one star goes to the fun opening credits, the women who were more masculine than men, and zero radiation:-) (01.07.2021)

I found the American movie Army of the Dead surprisingly good. It was good because the producers introduced us to some great characters, and generally, they were not badly written or flat. Even the main villain is great, and decidedly not flat. The movie gets quite emotional, so I thought Army of the Dead works well in the end. (28.05.2021)