Army of Thieves - You wanted a prequel to Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead right?

Hopefully it will shed some light on the robot zombies from the last movie.

-Tom

Is Army of the Dead good?

Literally no one asked for this.

It is not.

OK I’ll avoid. Thanks!

I thought this was quite OK, as a comedic heist movie. It has basically none of Snyder’s stench on it, and the tie-ins to Army of Dead are irrelevant. (Though even the few tie-ins that are there end up diminishing both movies. And yes, amazingly enough it is possible for Army of Dead to be diminished even further.)

The movie clearly knows the tropes of the heist movie, and plays with them a bit, but I’m not convinced that the structure with three small heists really worked. They just weren’t elaborate enough.

There’s a major character motivation problem, that I really thought they’d address with a plot twist before the end of the movie, but instead ended up making worse.

All of the heists they pull off are tiny. Back of the envelope calculation, they probably got about 4M out of each of them. Not enough to make sense for that level of complexity and such a large crew.

Now, for a while I thought that the entire point of those first two heists was for those robberies to enable the final one somehow. And then it kind of turns out that something like that is indeed happening! It’s only the information about those first two robberies that makes the casino move the timetable. But it doesn’t actually work: nothing about the rest of the plan depended on the timetable changing, they could just as easily have only executed that last heist a couple of hours later and with no police.

And then it turns out that their plan was to ditch the truck and the safe in the middle of nowhere and with no transportation nearby, such that they couldn’t possibly get away with more than a couple of bags of money. Again.

Ok, so they weren’t in it for the money then, but just the reputation, or knowing that they’d finally done something “great”? Clearly not, out of the original crew only Gwen cared about that quest. The others were in it for the money, to such an extent that they’d always planned on cutting out the safe cracker to get a bigger share.

I liked it quite a lot. Damn fine directing from Matthias too

This is cheerfully mediocre, which does put it ahead of its offspring. Parent. Whatever.