Army of Thieves
NETFLIXZack Snyder’s Army of the Dead is one of the most visually striking films of the year, blending two distinct genres – the heist and Zombie flick – into one 150-minute long twisted, but terrifically entertaining ride that only a madman like Snyder could pull off. It celebrated the great Zombie films of the past with a modern, mythological – it is Snyder, after all –twist and quickly became one of Netflix’s most successful and viewed films. Of course, the streaming service was ready to expand the Army of the Dead-verse and rapidly greenlit a prequel film and an animated series that Snyder’s production company, The Stone Quarry, will oversee.
Whilst Snyder will direct Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas – the anime series set to release next year – Matthias Schweighöfer, star of Army of the Dead, helps bring Army of Thieves – the prequel film – to life in front and behind the camera. Army of Thieves is a rather paint-by-numbers portrait of Ludwig Dieter (also played by Schweighöfer), safecracker extraordinaire who gets his first crack (heh) at bank heists once he’s recruited by a mysterious woman named Gwendoline (Nathalie Emmanuel), giving him the opportunity to break into Hans Wagner’s legendary Ring series through three heists around Europe . . . unless an obsessed INTERPOL agent catches them first. For fans who wanted to see the universe expand and possibly look into the origins of the Zombie plague, prepare to be disappointed. What does this have to do with Mythological Zombies? Nothing, but it doesn’t necessarily matter since the film itself is a rather drab and completely unengaging heist venture audiences have seen before.
Gone are Snyder’s refined visual sensibilities – containing his newfound obsession with the bokeh lens – and expert action direction. Instead, in its place is an action venture with little to no personality or compelling visual direction and aesthetic. Schweighöfer, throughout, never draws a gripping action sequence. Most set-pieces are edited to complete shreds through a camera with poor framing and blocking and dismal cheap jump-cuts hiding the film’s poor stunt work on display. One sequence where Brad Cage (Stuart Martin), a member of Gwendoline’s team, distracts the bank through a hold-up is particularly dizzying to watch – and not in a good way. The cuts are too obvious and distractingly jarring, while the action has no sense of visual or physical rhythm.
None of the movements from the actors – or the camera – in Army of Thieves feels natural or properly thought out. In fact, the film only becomes visually interesting once it goes inside the safes to showcase their intricate designs. And it’s the only time where Snyder’s influence can be felt in the project. Sadly, everything else feels like an afterthought. The action, the Zombies, heck, even the characters, who are pitifully uninteresting, compared to the tight-knit relationships of Snyder’s film. Fundamentals of its predecessor that are lacking ten-fold in this outing. Made stranger is that there are ‘Zombies’ in this story, who appear in a couple of brief dream sequences to remind audiences that they are indeed watching an Army of the Dead-verse film, but there’s never a moment where their presence feels warranted or remotely effective.
It also doesn’t help that every single character is a walking cliché of a heist film trope. There is the Hacker (Ruby O. Fee), the getaway driver (Guz Khan), the Pickpocket (Emmanuel) and the “brawns” (Martin). All of them are plucked straight out of the “Heist Films for Dummies” book and never rise above their clichéd and superficial character traits. Granted, Schweighöfer’s film does have the chance to elevate and subvert expectations of the conventional characters in a twist of sorts but, before long, it becomes abundantly clear that no such precedent is going to be set. Army of Thieves is the basic and derivative bore that it quite blazingly advertises itself to be.
None of the supporting actors put forward particularly interesting performances here, since the material they are given is too clichéd and one note for the performers to infuse their own personality in their roles. That being said, thankfully Schweighöfer and Emmanuel have terrific chemistry together. Both actors are highly skilful, and it is fun to see Schweighöfer give more depth this time around to Dieter before he became the safecracker who opened the Gotterdammerung during a Zombie outbreak in Las Vegas. Nevertheless, the fundamentals here are against the film, as a prequel, the audience already knows Dieter’s fate and arc at the end of Snyder’s film. Due to this, it’s increasingly hard to get emotionally invested in Army of Thieves’ story, with the material left to oversee both dull and uninteresting. A clichéd story prevents Army of Thieves and the story of Dieter from subverting any pre-conceived trope on the heist film. Every bump in the road gets solved quite easily, and the INTERPOL cop is a mere distraction who will, predictably, never be one step ahead of the time, even if he oh-so-desperately wants to. It is tiresome convention that has been done before, without an ounce of creativity or any effort in reinventing the wheel of the heist flick, even with a dash of so-called new paint.
In a harsh examination, there feels absolutely no reason for Army of Thieves to exist at all. Not even one scene throughout the lengthy running time justifies the film’s relevance. It only exists for Netflix to flex their content muscles and show the world they can attract high profile filmmakers like Snyder to produce films for them, but if Snyder’s not at the helm, what’s the point? Army of Thieves has no sense of action pace, it never carries the same visual wonder as Snyder’s film does, its performances – aside from Emmanuel and Schweighöfer – are terribly standard, and the script is way too formulaic for its own good. Worst of all, it never expands on the Dead-verse, aside from a brief mention of Hiroyuki Sanada’s Bly Tanaka, sparse Zombie appearances and an end tag that sets things in motion for Army of the Dead that is literally taken from the Snyder film – a clear indication of the laziness of this feature. Unfortunately, Schweighöfer does not carry the same visual panache and masterful worldbuilding that Snyder has. As a result, he ultimately fails at making his movie a memorable one. Moral of the story: if Zack Snyder isn’t helming it, then it shouldn’t be done, unless the director understands the world Snyder created, and, unfortunately, Schweighöfer does not seem to be interested in doing any justice to that world.