The Worst: Army of the Dead
For all of its adrenaline-drenched action sequences and somewhat enjoyable premise, Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead got too tripped up in a tangle of its own ideas to be a properly impressive zombie film. Because the genre is so well-trodden at this point, zombie movies live and die by their ability to imagine heroes battling the undead who don’t frustrate you to the point that you don’t want to watch them. Army of the Dead was at its strongest when it was a movie about competent mercenaries for hire working together against a new breed of zombie. But Snyder’s love of homing in on overwrought scenes of humanity meant to make you empathize with people in the middle of the apocalypse cut Army of the Dead off at its knees, which is a shame because it really did have a lot of things going for it.
