The Quick and the Dead

The streaming revolution continues, and we've dropped to 2 discs a week so that we can add a streaming slot. Just a few weeks behind the crowd, we watched Zach Snyder's Army of the Dead (2021).

It starts with a military convoy outside of Las Vegas meeting a guy getting road head, head on. The convoy's payload turns out to be a fast fierce zombie, who kills or turns everyone, then heads for Vegas, baby. We get a credit sequence montage of Vegas getting taken over by zombies, then a montage of various heroic types, including Dave Bautista, rescuing women and children. But last few of these woman and children are Dave's wife and daughter, and they get zombie chomped. Then a shipping container is lowered onto them, squishing them. These containers form a wall around Las Vegas.

Fast forward a while (months? years?). Dave is a short order cook outside of zombie occupied Las Vegas. Hiroyuki Sanada shows up and wants him to get a team together for a heist. The president plans to nuke Las Vegas in four days. They are going to pull $20 millRion out of a casino before the bomb falls.

So he puts together his team, starting with his estranged daughter, the one he didn't have to kill, Ella Purnell. She leads him to Mattias Shweighofer, a German-accented fancy boy safecracker, and Nora Amezeder, a coyote who gets people into and out of Vegas. Then there's some muscle who I'll skip, and Theo  Rossi (Shades from Luke Cage) as a creepy, rapey security guard, who Amezeder invites along for reasons that become clear later.

Then there's Tig Notaro as helicopter pilot, for the extraction. She was brought in after the movie wrapped, because the guy who had done her role turned out to be a sex pest. She fits seamlessly in, although she worked almost exclusively against green screens and tennis balls on sticks. She is also the most fun character in the movie. Then there's Garret Dillahunt, as Sanada's stooge, who is plainly the guy who is going to betray them all for his own gain.

So that's the crew, and we haven't even gotten into Vegas. It's a long movie, folks. 

But it's a funny one, and cool - there are shambling zombies and fast zombies, a zombie tiger and a zombie horse, a king and queen zombie, zombie showgirls and gamblers. There are supposed to be robot zombies, but we didn't spot them. They do find a set of corpses that look a lot like them - like they are in a time loop or something, which they discuss for a little, go "Whoa, heavy" and move on. 

There are also major lapses in logic, logistics, credibility, and pacing. Also, Snyder did a lot of his own cinematography with old Canon "Dream" lens, with a very narrow depth of field, so backgrounds are very out of focus and dreamy. It's a look, but maybe overdone. There are also some (3?) clever rack focus shots going from a face in focus to the gun pointing at the screen - racked too fast to be real, probably CGI. So a lot of Snyder just goofing around.

Sadly, Bautista didn't get to goof around much, mostly being angsty over his dead wife and child. But he does dream of someday owning a food truck: Maybe tofu, or lobster rolls.