Army Of The Dead: 9 Stupid Blunders That Completely Ruined It
1. The Tone Is COMPLETELY Wrong
And finally, the biggest problem with Army of the Dead is its tone. What makes this problem so infuriating is that not only was it easy to fix, but had it been fixed it could've saved the entire movie.
A film that combined the zombie and heist film genres was always going to be a fairly silly offering, and Army really needed to embrace this light-heartedness in order to work.
Yes, fine, it does do that... but only sometimes. The rest of the time, it indulges in the aforementioned overly serious and atrociously written emotional subplots that frequently turn the film into a sour misery fest.
The excellent opening titles and some of the action sequences hint at the movie this should've been: an exuberant, fun, likeable and darkly comedic work that knows what it is and focuses on delivering entertaining genre thrills rather than shoe-horning in melodramatic scenes where they weren't needed. These flashes of awesomeness only makes this an even more frustrating viewing.
To sum up, Army of the Dead definitely had some good elements and a huge amount of potential, but sadly it just didn't quite come together in the end. Hopefully the upcoming spin-offs will avoid all these mistakes.