Fans of Zack Snyder’s oeuvre must have felt vindicated by the acclaim lavished on his four-hour director’s cut of Justice League.
That film, which he was forced to step aside from in post-production following the death of his daughter in 2017, had fallen into the hands of Avengers guru Joss Whedon, who cut things back and reshot key scenes, to the ire of Snyder’s followers.
The result satisfied no one: gloomily lit, badly edited, laden down with portentous dialogue and clumsy Cgi, Justice League bombed at the box office and did existential harm to the DC Extended Universe franchise, which is only being kept alive at this stage by Wonder Woman. Foul!, cried the Snyder-ites, who promptly launched a #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement — don’t these people have jobs?
Zack Snyder’s Justice League was released in March, delighting fans and critics, most of whom decided it was infinitely superior to the butchered 2017 film: some even thought it a work of genius. Not so sure about that.
Though Snyder is best known these days for indifferent superhero films, he made his name with a clever 2004 remake of George A Romero’s classic Day Of The Dead, and the director returns to his zombie roots in Army Of The Dead, which at least boasts a modestly original premise.
Las Vegas, which probably deserves it, has been overrun by a zombie plague, and the authorities have decided to abandon the desert Gomorrah to its fate.
A high wall of stacked shipping containers has been erected around the city to restrain the zombies, who will shortly be obliterated by a nuclear bomb. With a festive touch, the government announces it will be dropped on July 4.
That gives hammy underworld boss Mr Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) just four days to extract $200m in ill-gotten earnings from a vault beneath his own casino.
As the city is awash with flesh-eaters, a team of specialists will be needed, and Tanaka begins his search with one Scott Ward (Dave Bautista), a mercenary who helped evacuate civilians from Vegas before it was overrun.
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As Scott is now unhappily flipping burgers, he agrees to assemble a team which will include souls well versed in the annihilation of zombies, as well as a safe-breaker and a helicopter pilot — a chopper parked on top of the casino tower will be their only route out.
Among Scott’s tough-talking associates are: Maria (Ana de la Reguera), his girlfriend and expert zombie-clipper; a deep-thinking mercenary called Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick); and Ludwig (Matthias Schweighofer), a nervy German safe-cracker. But to complicate matters, Scott’s estranged daughter Kate (Ella Purnell) has also insisted on joining them.
Snyder tends not to make terse, 90-minute dramas, and this latest production is typically modest in scope. Almost two-and-a-half hours long, Army Of The Dead sets out its stall in a lavish opening credits sequence which depicts the zombies’ initial assault on Vegas.
As panic takes hold, showgirls and fake Elvises are transformed into dead-eyed flesh-eaters while a small band of warriors shoot holes in them. This orgy of blood-letting is accompanied by a cheesy version of Viva Las Vegas. So much for American popular culture.
When Scott and his team of ne’er do wells return to the now devastated city, their task is made tougher by the fact that these are not the lumbering, two-mile-an-hour zombies of yore, but nimble, athletic, speedy types that creep up without warning and have bitten your throat out before you’ve even noticed.
The smarter ones seem like refugees from a dance class, especially ‘The Bride’ (Athena Perample), the Alpha Queen of the zombies, who introduces her presence with a most diverting hip dance.
The severed limbs and heads pile high before Scott and Co have even reached the loot. Snyder is clearly having a lot of fun here: the question is, are we?
Army Of The Dead’s sets and creatures are well designed, and the plot has a stark clarity that might have made it effective.
Ex-wrestler Bautista is not without a certain bulky charm, and Snyder has fun mocking ‘bleeding heart’ liberals, one of whom worries on a TV news show that nuking zombies might not be ethical.
But for the most part, Army Of The Dead indulges in the tedious, brainless, cartoonish nihilism that has become Snyder’s trademark.
The wisecracks the crew trade during their extended killing spree are not funny, Snyder fails to restrain his slo-mo tic, and one emerges from the wreckage of Las Vegas none the wiser, and slightly stupider.
I would like to have seen this retro thriller before the focus groups and a snip-happy producer got their hands on it.
Cursed from the get-go, Joe Wright’s film was shot in 2018 and had its release delayed after disappointing test screenings prompted producer Scott Rudin to undertake extensive re-shoots.
Then 20th Century Fox was bought by Disney, Rudin was accused of abusive behaviour, and The Woman In The Window was sold to Netflix. Amy Adams (right), surprisingly good for the most part, is Dr Anna Fox, a child psychologist who lives alone in a creepy old Harlem brownstone.
She’s agoraphobic, has mental health issues and drinks, all of which makes her a poor witness when she claims she witnessed a murder in the house across the street.
The movie’s debt to Hitchcock films like Rear Window and Spellbound is obvious, and visual tributes are sometimes overplayed.
But despite a schlocky B-picture ending, Wright’s film is not as bad as reviews suggest, and might have been good if it hadn’t been so comprehensively fiddled with.
Rating: Three stars
The Human Factor (ifi@home, 108 mins)
At the start of Dror Moreh’s insightful documentary, Coptic-American interpreter Gamal Helal describes how he has served four US presidents, four secretaries of state, all convinced they were the ones who would solve an age-old problem — peace in the Middle East.
“They thought they could just ignore history, but history is part of the curse,” Helal says. In The Human Factor, we watch various American diplomats and politicians attempt the impossible.
In 1991, Secretary of State James ‘The Hammer’ Baker used all his skill to bring Arabs and Israelis around the negotiating table, and when Bill Clinton came to power in 1993, he went one better, pushing Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin towards historic peace accords.
The problem would be living up to them, as extremists on both sides used terrorism to undermine the tentative agreement.
Moreh, who also made the excellent The Gatekeepers, compiles his interviews masterfully, and all the diplomats he talks to make the point that, without trust, there can be no lasting peace. As I write, battle rages.
