Army of the Dead (2021)

Things on which I am agnostic: Las Vegas, Elvis Presley, Zack Snyder, zombies. They are all reasonably charged with excess and putting them all together certainly leads to the reasonable expectation of an excess of excess. I don't appreciate any of them simply for existing—Elvis comes closest to that, and he doesn't have that much to do with Army of the Dead. He's more like window dressing to signify Vegas, him and that song. For that matter, Vegas is not really Vegas. It is a pile of rubble in this movie with a wall built around it to keep the zombies in. On the 4th of July in this movie the president is going to drop a nuclear bomb on it, wiping out pesky zombies once and for all. Great stores of cash still exist inside vaults within the old "Lost Wages" party town in the desert and a team of experts is dispatched in to retrieve as much of it as they can before the nuke hits. Army of the Dead is thus basically a heist or caper movie, is what I'm trying to say here, even within its context of intentional ludicrous excess. I happen to disapprove of tarting up the zombie mythos with things like fast zombies, but Army of the Dead has it all: fast zombies, slow zombies, even a zombie hierarchy, which looks a bit insectile with its obedience to and worship of a brainy queen with her various lieges. You still have to get them in the head. That seems to be the constant in zombie movies. I admit I appreciated the choreography of some of these fast zombie fights—the fast zombies seem to have their own way of fighting, always protecting the head. Army of the Dead is a long picture at two and a half hours but it gets down to business with few delays, spins out a number of interesting narrative threads, and generally does not overstay its welcome, allowing for repulsion factors. As for Snyder I've only seen 300 and Watchmen—I know, not even the Dawn of the Dead remake. Both 300 and Watchmen, I thought, were basically on the mediocre side of average all things considered. By reputation Snyder has done worse. I got a kick out of a lot of the parts of Army of the Dead, which is really all you can ask of today's tentpole popcorn movies, right? P.S. I also watched it at home.