When Netflix debuted Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead last spring, the big-budget, big-runtime zombie flick marked a turn away from comic book epics and a return to the horror-on-steroids fare the director had previously made a meal of with his 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. More importantly, by bringing Snyder into their fold, it signalled Netflix’s desire to tap into the Man of Steel director’s vocal, passionate Internet fanbase to hopefully propel new franchises and shared universes aplenty for the streaming service. Unfortunately, Army of Thieves arrives as a bit of an inauspicious test case for that hypothesis thanks to an over-reliance on Army of the Dead’s thin story.
A prequel set six years before the earlier film’s running-jumping-biting antics in Las Vegas, the film is centered on safecracker Ludwig Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer, also directing) before he became the Ludwig Dieter. A taciturn bank teller dreaming of excitement while posting videos about impregnable safes on YouTube (to embarrassingly low viewers numbers), is pulled into a heist by the beautiful Gwen (Nathalie Emmanuel), a fugitive jewel thief looking to make a legendary score while an impending zombie apocalypse begins to consume the United States. They make for a fun pair, and one wonders if their chemistry might’ve had better opportunities to flourish without this story’s baggage of the connection to Army of the Dead.
In that same vein, other than the aforementioned die hard Snyder fans, it’s hard to discern who exactly a movie like Army of Thieves is aimed at. It’s not enough of a zombie movie to satisfy that audience, and not enough of a heist movie for that audience. Instead, it’s a strange hybrid of a thing that seems to feel the mythology Army of the Dead established only five months ago is so substantial and/or iconic as to require significant excavation. And it’s just...not.
That said, of the roster of dead people walking in Army of the Dead, Schweighöfer’s Dieter is definitely one of the most colorful and interesting, so a prequel centered on him isn’t the worst idea in the world. He has a manic, high-strung energy making him an interesting, if offbeat, protagonist. However, since the character himself says in that film he hadn’t encountered a zombie before, it somewhat limits how much terrain is available to explore here.
And so, in lieu, of a deeper examination of the zombie plague and its roots (which, to be fair, may still be forthcoming in some other Army project down the line), we get Shaun of the Dead-style snippets of flesh-eating hordes engulfing America interspersed with our main characters – including getaway driver Rolph (Guz Khan), hacker Karina (Ruby O. Fee), and bad boy wild card Brad (Stuart Martin) – heisting overseas while trying to evade INTERPOL. It’s just nothing all that noteworthy – by this point we’ve seen so many heist movies (including plenty of Netflix originals on the subject) the only thing left for screenwriter Shay Hatten to do is run through a litany of heist movie tropes while commenting on how predictable heist movie tropes are.
Most of the zombie gore is reserved for several dream sequences detailing Dieter’s nightmares about being consumed by zombies. There’s also an ending scene that will prove meaningful to Army of the Dead fans by lining this movie up with that one. On that note, while Snyder is only producing this go-round, his signature stylistic template is very much in evidence even as Schweighöfer confidently makes the production his own. There’s a fun, manic energy to some of the sequences that makes me want to see him direct a movie that’s a bit more fully realized and less reliant on connections to other films.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/3Grifrq
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