First up, at 148 minutes this movie is too damn long. Not that there's any arbitrary ideal length for a movie, every movie should be as long as it takes to tell its story. But one easy way to check if it's too damn long is to ask yourself, after each scene, "What was the point of this?" If you can't answer the question on half the scenes, then guess what, the movie is too damn long.
The premise of this Ocean's-11-meets-I-am-Legend movie is achingly simple: crew break into a Vegas casino infested with zombies. This is not a story that takes 148 minutes to tell.
Not that it isn't fun in places. The middle stretch, once the team is actually in the casino and things slowly start to unwind, has some charming team-building and genuine tension. But the first third drags on for too long and sets up things with no payoff, and the last third is just people slow-motion running and shooting things.
Dave Bautista, getting a leading man role here, is the leader of the crew. He's hired by Hiroyuki Sanada to retrieve money from the zombie casino before the US government nukes it. He's supported by a Hispanic mechanic (Ana de la Reguera), dude with a chainsaw (Omari Hardwick), a German safecracker (Matthias Schweighofer), a pilot (Tig Notaro CGIed in after the previous actor was accused of sexual misconduct), a guide (Nora Arnezeder), a CoD Zombies Twitch streamer (Raul Castillo) and his redshirt I mean buddy (Samantha Win), plus a slimy camp guard and Dave's daughter (Ella Purnell) also tag along, PLUS there's Sanada's shifty right-hand-man who is played by an actor who could be David Hasselhoff, but isn't (it's Garret Dillahunt).
Is that too many characters? Yep. It's overcrowded, and trying to stuff it all in leads to scenes that either drag on for too long, or else have no reason to exist at all.
For example, the Twitch streamer brings along another friend, who immediately chickens out when he learns the details of the mission. This contributes nothing.
We learn that there are some "alpha" zombies led by some kind of super-smart king zombie, and in a really icky scene, learn one of the lady zombies is/was pregnant. This contributes nothing.
Notaro gets a bunch of unfunny scenes trying to fix a damaged chopper. There could have been tension in the will-the-chopper-actually-fly scene, but she fixes everything in advance and the lift off no problems. Contribution: Zero.
Dave has a heart-to-heart with his daughter where we see he is motivated not by greed but by guilt and desire to be a better father--good!--this is shortly followed by ANOTHER heart-to-heart with the mechanic where SHE reveals she is not motivated by greed but by her love for Dave and no, we don't need everyone's in-depth motivations and this literally repeats the emotional beats we just had. Also, the Mechanic is immediately killed after. So yeah. Negative one contribution.
There is, of course, a double-cross, but honestly the reasoning behind it so ludicrous and manages to makes the entire premise of the movie dumb, like, zombie dumb.
The other things that drag the movie out are Snyder's evident affinity for slow-mo gunfights and having things be out of focus. Used sparingly, either might be effective, but sheer repetition kind of drains the energy here.
I said it was fun though, didn't I, and it is in the middle-stretch. Matthias Schweighofer in particular absolutely steals the movie as the German safecracker. He's the only character with any kind of arc (goes from scared of zombies to able to fight zombies), and his relationship with Omari Hardwick's hard-ass merc is the only one that shows any development or genuine warmth as Hardwick goes from despising the deadweight to genuine comradeship. Plus Matthias is an absolute hoot as a physical actor.
In fits and starts there's also some genuine tension. Like redshirt Samantha Win is predictably offed early on due to the double-cross, but the movie still gets tension out of this: As she fights through swarms of zombies, we wonder not whether she will survive, but if she will live long enough to reveal the double-cross.
More of that kind of smart writing could really have come in handy but instead we're back to slow-mo bullet fests. Cue sequel hook. Roll credits.
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