Once we’re inside Vegas proper, we see an undead version of one of Siegfried and Roy’s tigers roaming the devastated streets.
Surrounding Vegas is a quarantine area, filled with refugees living in tents who seem to be stuck in a bureaucratic no-man’s-land, preyed upon by craven guards. The initial scenes of the gang’s entry into Las Vegas offer promise as well, with Snyder concocting interesting spins on familiar zombie tropes. Joining in at the last minute are a corporate overseer (Garret Dillahunt) and Kate (Ella Purnell), Scott’s semi-estranged daughter, with whom he still has unresolved issues over that time he stabbed her zombie mother in the brain. The group includes, among others, a traumatized, buzzsaw-toting badass (Omari Hardwick) a brilliant but inexperienced German safecracker (Matthias Schweighöfer) a wisecracking helicopter pilot (Tig Notaro) a YouTube star (Raúl Castillo) famous for his zombie-killing videos and a stoic French “coyote” (Nora Arnezeder) who has experience leading groups of renegades back into and out of the undead city. So, Scott and his old pal Cruz (Ana de la Reguera) start assembling a team, Dirty Dozen/ Seven Samurai–style. military has decided to nuke the city on the upcoming Fourth of July holiday, so Scott and whomever he brings along basically have one day to accomplish all this. Scott Ward (Dave Bautista), a mercenary behemoth now working a grill in a dead-end diner, is enlisted by a mysterious billionaire (Hiroyuki Sanada) to go back into Zombie Vegas, break into a vault under a casino, and retrieve the fortune stashed there. The next hour or so is quite engaging, too. This is the first 15 or so minutes of Army of the Dead, and it is basically perfect. (My favorite image: a paratrooper desperately firing away at the slavering throng of monsters below as his parachute lands him ever so gently in their midst, whereupon he is consumed.) Then, Vegas is bombed, an improvised cordon of giant shipping containers is stacked around it, and the city is ceded to the undead.Įnd opening credits. The military tries to take control and fails. As the music continues, the mayhem accelerates and expands (in slow motion, of course, because Zack Snyder) as we are introduced to our main characters escaping the undead, blowing away zombies, and sacrificing loved ones. Then comes exactly the right opening-credits sequence: Over a Richard Cheese and Alison Crowe cover of “Viva Las Vegas,” swarms of zombie showgirls, pageant queens, Elvis impersonators, and hotel maids feast on the people of Sin City. Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead begins exactly how a Vegas heist movie set during a zombie apocalypse should: with a guy getting a blow job while driving his car in the Nevada desert, accidentally ramming into a top-secret military convoy, and unleashing the sinister results of a clandestine government project.