Army of the Dead

Après Sucker Punch, il s’est dit que Zack Snyder devrait éviter d’écrire les scénarios lui-même. Après ce film-ci, on dira probablement qu’en plus de ne pas écrire le scénario, il devrait surtout ne plus jamais tenir la caméra ! Army of the Dead est une incroyable saloperie et le film est visuellement si moche et barbant qu’on en vient, par lassitude, à réfléchir à la logique de l’intrigue. Et là, c’est la cata ! Car de logique il n’y a point, les personnages sont conçus n’importe comment, les lignes narratives restent inachevées, les tentatives d’humour ratent le coche et le côté dramatique ne fonctionne pas. Côté horreur, nada. S’il fallait trouver quelque chose de positif à ce navet prétentieux, alors peut-être juste le fait que, malgré que ça tire en longueur, on n’a pas le temps de s’ennuyer car il y a toujours de l’action et aussi que cette action est toujours potable. Mais bon, c’est bien maigre pour un cinéaste qui nous a sorti, il y a une série d’années, l’un des films d’épouvante et de zombies les plus réussis de ce nouveau siècle. Malheureusement, aujourd’hui, il n’est plus que l’ombre de lui-même. (08/06/2021)

Un déchet colossal avec des personnages encombrants et des flous d'image de mauvais goût derrière eux, mais qui retient l'attention car il se passe suffisamment de choses « plaisantes » pour les fans du genre. L'expérience mitigée du spectateur est quelque peu sauvegardée par Bautista, qui non seulement est musculaire mais incarne aussi une personnalité de leader, et par un tigre zombie qui aurait dévoré cette guimauve d'Ang Lee en une bouchée ! (03/08/2021)

I don't understand what happened to Zack Snyder, a guy who has the brilliant Watchmen and the very good Man of Steel in his filmography and never really burned out creatively until now, to make shit like this. Pathetic, fucking boring and visually repulsive (no, the juicy opening credits and those few Las Vegas green screens don't cut it). It has only one decent action scene – the casino shootout – which doesn't come until half an hour before the end, and one single noteworthy idea, which is the zombie tiger. And leading the uninteresting ensemble of actors is Dave Bautista, whose acting limits end somewhere near Hamáček's abilities when he talks about his disguise maneuver. (24/05/2021)

So sloppy, it's like nobody was trying very hard with Army of the Dead. The characters are so uninteresting that I didn't care what order they died in, the actors have no charisma or nothing to work with, and the first really interesting and entertaining action scene3 doesn't come until sometime at the beginning of the last quarter. Once they start shooting and slashing properly, it's quite fun, with Snyder keeping himself in check, so there aren't nearly enough of those slow-motion sequences to make it boring, it's just that there's about an hour of completely unnecessary ballast that is boring, where the most entertaining thing is how it all makes no sense at all. Sure, in a B-action flick, that shouldn't really matter, it's just that Army of the Dead may be a B-movie, but it really isn’t. There's climactic brutality , it only falls into the horror category because there are zombies. And Snyder's playing with the camera, which often leads to ugly visuals full of out-of-focus shots (which was supposedly the artistic intent), is more annoying than effective. I don't know. An hour after the closing credits, I can recall virtually nothing of it. Just that I was expecting a lot more than another routine Netflix movie, and I really didn't have those expectations particularly high. An unimaginative and boring waste of time. (21/05/2021)

I think I could enjoy a stupidly scripted zombie horror B-movie, but in this case most of my disappointment stems from the fact that there was no ambition whatsoever to make anything resembling horror. The tone is just overstuffed action nonsense that happens to feature zombies, and I was also surprised at how ugly it looks in many sequences. Moreover, such a banal film, which narratively and conceptually does not bring anything original and interesting, cannot be two and a half hours long for God's sake! You could throw away 45 minutes without any problem. Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead is on another league and I’m afraid we will never see anything like it again from Zack. (26/05/2021)