Army Of Thieves proves that sometimes less is more, especially when no one asked for more of this style.
Serving as a prequel backstory for who was a small side character in Army Of The Dead, we follow Sebastien as he comes from a nobody with a Youtube channel to getting picked to join a group of thieves attempting a 3 part heist. From here we follow the group, while being chased by police, as they attempt to break into vaults never before down and Sebastien becomes confident in his own self.
The story follows about as generic of a plot and set points as expected. Feeling very lifeless as it flows through from set piece to set piece without any sense of danger or importance. That may be one of the biggest issues here is that at no point does anything here feel like it matters much. Sebastien grows himself into who we see in Army Of The Dead but the two characters personalities between the two don’t connect nor did anything in this story seem to make a difference.
Sadly we don’t even get exciting action or suspense to carry us through. With a 2+ hour run time the film seems to focus more the build up and time between heists than it does anything else. What action we get is quickly over and especially out final heist and act just feels so anti climatic. It doesn’t help either that the film so heavily tries to put comedy into it but never actually seems to get a joke to work.
What might just be the worst part is that this film isn’t technically bad. Matthias Schweighöfer who plays our lead also directs the film and has made sure to take a page out of the Zack Synder handbook so the film looks nice. Everything is done in a degree thats well above your average straight to dvd film and had the makings of a good movie. It just feels so rushed and as if there were too many cooks here putting their input in.
Knowing this was the plan to kick off Synders Zombie-Verse makes sense but this seems like one that could of went without. An almost zombieless, bland, and lifeless heist movie that is forgotten just as soon as its finished.
Score :
2 / 5
