What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.
We hope.
We’re not just talking about an old advertising tagline, or a misguided weekend, or even an ill-advised quickie marriage here. We’re talking about a no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners, don’t-leave-the-lights-on zombie apocalypse.
It was the government’s fault. A military convey from Area 51 to who knows where ended up literally crashing and burning. The convoy’s payload—a zombie (of course)—escaped (of course) and eventually made his way to Sin City, turning every blackjack dealer, geriatric gambler and Elvis impersonator into one of his undead minions.
If New York’s the City that Never Sleeps, Las Vegas is the City that Never Dies and Wishes It Could. The government cried uncle (along with, we assume, several swear words) and built a wall around the entire gaming Mecca, gambling (get it?) that the zombies would stay behind those Nevada walls.
It’s pretty unimaginable that anyone would want to get in. But, of course, someone does want in. Billionaire Bly Tanaka left something in Vegas: 200 million somethings, actually. The cash is still safely sequestered in the vault of his casino: Sure, he’s already collected the insurance money. But a little extra change never hurt anyone. He’s willing to pay a team to retrieve it, and he’ll let them keep $50 million to split among the survivors.
The catch? Zombies, of course.
The other catch? The government plans to nuke the city in just a few days. Any foolhardy team willing to take Tanaka’s job needs to get in and get out before, y’know, they drop the bomb.
Tanaka turns to Scott Ward—one of the lucky few who escaped a zombie-ravaged Vegas earlier, a guy who also saved the Secretary of Defense and earned a medal in the process. They’ll let him build a team from the ground up, as long as it includes a safecracker (to get in the vault) and a helicopter pilot (to fly safely out … at least, theoretically).
Scott’s had his fill of zombies. But the money Tanaka’s offering is life-changing money—and his life could use some changes. Why, if he had a few million in his pocket, he might be able to give it to his estranged daughter. Nothing like several thousand Benjamins to smooth troubled waters. But for that to happen, Scott and his team need to stay alive.
Scott is still in touch with a couple other Vegas survivors: Maria and Vanderohe. The three of them helped pull plenty of people to safety back in the day, and all of them feel a bit underappreciated for risking so much for so little. “Everything we did, all those people saved, look at what it got us,” Scott grouses. “What if, just once, we did something just for us?”
Turns out, though, neither they nor most of the people they convince to join the team stay that selfish. Most start with the money in mind, but ultimately, they all risk their lives for each other. Some make the ultimate sacrifice.
Some seemed like pretty good people before the mission, too. Maria would fix up her friends’ cars for cheap. Vanderohe worked at some sort of rehabilitation center.
Scott’s daughter, Kate, might’ve been the biggest do-gooder of the bunch—working as a volunteer at a massive detention camp just outside the walls of Vegas. (It’s filled with people under observation for fear that they might become zombies, though they’ve been there for a very long time now.) Kate befriends one of the women (named Geeta) there and helps watch her kids. And when Geeta prepares to take a big risk herself, she asks Kate to care for her children if anything happens to her.
Sin City? Bly seems to think so. Otherwise, it’d be a bit of a mystery why he’d name the two towers of his hotel/casino “Sodom” and “Gomorrah.” Another resort there—a buzzing hub of zombie activity—is known as Olympus (the mountain on which the gods of Greek myth were supposed to reside), and in the credits, the head zombie is known as Zeus. A military unit is codenamed “the Four Horsemen,” a reference obviously to the horsemen from the book of Revelation. One member of the unit wonders if they’re transporting a metaphorical “holy grail.”
We hear an obscene reference to Botticelli’s painting Madonna of the Magnificat.
In the movie’s opening minutes, a passel of topless zombies (presumably Vegas showgirls before their recent demise) attack some still-living patrons. We see lots of their attributes, some of which are spattered in other people’s blood.
The whole calamity was caused by a pair of newlyweds driving away from Las Vegas after tying the knot. The bride (sporting some sort of bustier) decides to honor the occasion by giving the groom oral sex while driving. We don’t see anything else except the man’s expression of bliss on his face … and a horrific car crash soon after.
A guard in the refugee facility leers and makes suggestive remarks toward some of the facility’s female residents (who clearly loathe him). He and another woman engage in some innuendo-soaked conversation. Some women wear slightly revealing outfits. Guys—both alive and dead—go shirtless.
An intimate, subtleb gesture between two women perhaps suggests there’s more to their friendship.
[Spoiler Warning] Some of the zombies we meet are stronger, faster and more intelligent than your average shambler, and that includes Vegas’ undead queen. She wears a pretty revealing getup (though her undead flesh isn’t exactly pinup material) and has a sexual relationship with Zeus. The two don’t kiss or anything, but they do growl affectionately at each other and engage in something of a sultry embrace. Later, we learn that this zombie queen was pregnant.
Give Army of the Dead a red star: It just might be the bloodiest movie of 2021 thus far, and it’s hard to conceive of another contender. We see seemingly hundreds of humans and zombies perish (or re-perish) in mostly horrific ways, and it’d be impossible to tabulate that body count. All the blood shed here would overflow the fountains at the Bellagio. So I’ll just toss in a smattering—or rather splattering—of examples.
First, unfortunate humans: A man has his lower jaw ripped off. Someone is speared through the chest and pinned to a wall. A guy gets horrifically mauled by an undead tiger (which culminates in the tiger biting and bursting the man’s skull like a grape). Someone is shot in the foot and left as an “offering” to the zombies. (Another person is shot, too, spewing blood across a windshield.)
A poor military parachutist gently falls into a horde of shamblers; despite shooting dozens of them on the way down, he’s quickly overwhelmed. (The mayhem is shielded by the parachute, but blood spurts and shows through from the white fabric’s underside.) We see people torn to pieces by zombies, resulting in geysers of blood. One zombie bites a human and pulls away pieces of tendon and muscle in his mouth. A multi-vehicle accident results in a massive explosion and several more fatalities. A man and a zombie get into a fistfight, in which the man is pretty severely brutalized.
Now, the zombies. One has his head cut in ragged halves by a close-proximity bullet. Another gets pin-cushioned by darts, filled with bullet lead and finally squashed between a gigantic, rapid, vice-like trap. (Blood spurts out of the two halves of the trap, staining the exterior. Then, when the contraption pulls apart, gore is strung like a web across both.) A zombie has its head slowly sawn off by a wire; the still-living (and very angry) head is removed from the body, but still looks rather lively. A zombie is quite literally shot to pieces. Several more are grotesquely dispatched via massive radial saw.
We’re really just scratching the surface (if you will) with this rundown. We see hundreds of casualties not encompassed by this quick list. But many are rather rote.
Zombies bite, and we see them rip plenty of flesh out of human beings, which almost always shoot out blood as if they were water balloons. In turn, zombies die via damage to the brain, and we see countless undead dispatched via bullet (sometimes tearing away pieces of skull) and knife. A few humans and many, many zombies die via explosions.
And … there’s more.
People are thrown into walls. A head falls from a rooftop to gorily splatter on the ground below. Hundreds of zombie bodies are piled up by the walls. Someone explains that the undead hordes are lifeless because they didn’t know to get out of the Nevada sun, which stripped them of all animating water. (We’re told that when it rains, they reanimate for a couple of hours.)
We’re informed that one of the guards of the refugee center has been raping women in the center. Someone’s punched in the face. We see loads of corpses, including some suspended from city wires.
When Kate starts swearing up a storm, Scott cautions her to watch her language. “We’re about to march into a sea of dead people and commit grand larceny, but excuse me for swearing,” she quips.
She’s far from the only one to curse, though. Her dad and loads of others utter the f-word more than 40 times, the s-word more than 20 and the c-word once. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n” and “h—.” God’s name is misused about 25 times (half of which are paired with “d–n”), and Jesus’ name is abused twice.
A character drinks champagne and asks a couple of women to pour themselves glasses of the stuff, too (even though they’re working). Scott and Maria drink beer together. Tanaka quaffs a glass of whiskey.
As Kate mentions, our heroes are attempting to commit grand larceny—technically a crime, whether it’s done in a zombie-infested city or no. The caper involves plenty of people lying, too—some more than others. And one member of the team is following another plan altogether—one that could lead to further societal disaster.
A guard at a detention facility abuses his power, threatening to declare that someone’s showing signs of zombie-ism if she’s not more subservient. There’s a strange use of an ethnic slur.
The movie takes place in Las Vegas. We see a bit of gambling early on and, of course, plenty of deserted slot machines and gaming tables. But most of the gambling that takes place here are simply the characters betting their lives when it comes making it out of the place.
Everyone knows that you can dispatch a zombie with some sort of blow to the brain. But in the world of entertainment, zombies never truly die.
The zombie—the George Romero, Night of the Living Dead zombie, at least—is perhaps pop culture’s most enduring, most elastic monster. While any sane person would be terrified of undead relatives shambling after you to eat your brains, zombies in movies and TV often fill a metaphorical role, too: representing everything from the dangers of communism to the living death of consumerism.
And here, in this bleak, chaotic, Zack Snyder splatterfest, these undead legions moonlight as deeper societal reflections, too. This particular horde of zombies was birthed (or at least co-opted) by the American military, reflecting a certain societal cynicism about the institution. The detention camps (and the more pedestrian horrors we see within them) are intended to draw viewers’ minds to the camps along the U.S.-Mexican border today; and when the wall goes up around Las Vegas, perhaps we’re intended to think about other walls, too.
But let’s not push that metaphor too far or give the movie too much credit. Whatever nods that Army of the Dead makes to current events, it’s just thin frosting on a very bloody and (if you’ll excuse the expression) brain-dead cake.
This film is all about the zombies. And not your metaphorical, “let’s ponder what this means” zombies; but real, dead, dangerous, flesh-eating zombies. It’s all about the people fighting them, blending an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist movie with apocalyptic horror. But mostly, it’s about the blood. And gore. And guts. And more blood.
Is this movie terrifying? Not really. Obscenely grotesque? Oh, yeah. Some folks like obscenely grotesque films, of course, and they’ll eat this one up (so to speak). The rest of us might wisely make like the movie’s Las Vegas residents early on: Run like crazy to get away.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
