Army of the Dead (2021, Nutflix) Possible spoilers

The guy at the briefing who walks out when he finds out what the mission is. I thought you'd see him get killed for knowing too much, or appear at the end as a whistle blower. But nothing.

What bothered me the most about this movie was the lack of fun. It wasn't boring (though again, it had a few tough scenes that must've been three pages of dialog that only needed three sentences, tops) but it wasn't zany, either. You open with topless zombies, you tease a zombie Elvis impersonator in the trailer, give me more of that. This is Vegas, give me something nuts. A magician, zombie Wayne Newton, something. They probably wanted to avoid a celebrity zombie to avoid the obvious comparison to Bill Murray in Zombieland, but come on.

Another puzzling script decision is this movie's misuse of almost all of its core characters. It goes out of its way wasting time giving us backstories for them all, then does nothing with most of them. The two best characters were the helo pilot and the safecracker, and that's because they were the only characters who had actual personalities. Everyone else was just there. Why does the one guy love the saw so much? Who knows, he never talks about it. I don't even think he uses it other than in flashback. Guzman, the youtube personality they recruit on reputation; he takes a goofy selfie with his buddy when they get into Vegas, other than that the youtube celeb thing is never relevant to anything. He doesn't talk about it, he isn't obnoxious, it doesn't cloud his judgment; it doesn't matter to the story, and in the end neither does he.

It's strange that the movie bothers giving us these little tidbits about their personal lives in the hopes that we'll invest in these characters, and then just uses them as mindless fodder, not much different from the zombies they're hunting. (I'd question if that was supposed to be some kind of commentary, but let's be real, this is Zack Snyder we're talking about.) You want to build tension as the movie goes, you want me to care about these people as they get picked off one by one? Make them into real people. Think the marines from Aliens, nuff said.

I mentioned the general lack of action for much of the film. It starts off with a bang, then goes a while before we get any serious zombie hunting action. Ironically, the first character in the group to be killed (Guzman's buddy, and only because she's double crossed by the tycoon's minion) has arguably the best action scene in the film. She takes on a shit ton of zombies on her own, and even survives an assumed offscreen death only to be eventually overwhelmed-- but she does not go quietly. They have some brief shootouts but it's mostly a few zombies in a hallway, or hand to hand against the alphas. Arguably the greatest 5 seconds in the trailer (from the 2:34 to the 2:39 mark) never actually happens; it's a fantasy scenario as they're formulating the plan early on in the film. We needed that scene, or something like it.

For whatever reason, Snyder thought it necessary to give us zombie lore. These zombies are organized, they have a hierarchy, they gather and do chants and...they can procreate. (Not sure how a creature in an accelerated state of decay can do that, but whatever.) Point is, I don't care. Nobody cares about the goddamn zombies. Am I supposed to be rooting for the zombies? The zombies can just be ravenous fiends, Zack. That wrinkle doesn't add nuance to the story, it just wastes time that could've been spent on dialog/character quirks that make the humans more endearing.

Nitpicks.

1. Lily, why did you wait until everyone was inside zombieworld to notify them there were more dangerous zombies who were organized, intelligent and possessed super strength and agility? This seems like an important piece of intel to sit on as you all go into an op against a supernatural opponent on their turf.

2. Zombie lord. If you're so smart, why are you having your pregnant wife barter with armed hostiles on your borders? Seems like a recipe for disappointment.

3. And this is the big one. There's a bit of a plot twist. The heist is just a ruse, Tanaka actually just wants to capture an 'alpha' zombie for potential military experimentation. "It's worth ten times what's in the vault." So...why the subterfuge? Just hire this group of mercs for the same price ($50M) and tell them to capture an alpha, payment upon completion of extraction. You'll make your money back tenfold when you sell it to the military. If they all die, you lose nothing. Why bother with the double cross?