Viewers of any content branded as a Netflix original or the equivalent have reason to be wary. Zack Snyder’s much-hyped zombie apocalypse film Army of the Dead is a good example.

It may not be completely fair to write a review, of sorts, after turning it off at about a half hour in. After a scary opening scene (which assumes some really poor defensive-driving skills by U.S. soldiers), and then an interesting montage as the credits roll, Army of the Dead, however, seems to reveal what it is: A boring, cliche/trope-ridden opus with unsympathetic, box-checking characters.

As a fundamental issue in the context of the events portrayed in the movie, ask yourself if this is the crew that you would select for a team to handle a highly dangerous commando-style, heist mission in Las Vegas.

Setting that storyline aside, with an estimated $90 million production budget, you would think Snyder et al. might have hired someone to review the overly-long script with common sense in mind.

Netflix doesn’t release viewership info, but the company will undoubtedly claim the film is a big success, and the compliant media will go along with that. Two prequels are already planned, along with the possibility of a sequel.

Army of the Dead had a limited theatrical release, and it reportedly underperformed in those venues.

Apart from the obviously planted positive reviews, IMDB users are roasting the film, including that the 2-1/2 hour movie is full of plot holes.

Parenthetically, IMDB users generally waste a lot of bandwidth redundantly summarizing the plots of the movies they review, but in this instance, they tended to get right to the point:

Here’s a sample:

A script full of nonsense and holes. Fortunately the fails begin early, in the first 10 minutes, so anyone can be saved from suffer this bad joke.

There are fewer plot holes in all the Sharknado movies combined. Don’t waste your time.

If someone had just taken the time to correct some of the obvious errors and cut that bloated film down to 90 minutes it could have been great entertainment. But whoever was is charge here didn’t care and what we got instead is an uninspired mess that just keeps dragging on.

A truly awful outing for Snyder. Thin dumb plot, bad writing, terrible dialogue, cinematography of someone that doesn’t understand depth of field (wide open for everything). Yes you can have fun dumb movies. This one is just dumb.

There is literally ZERO character development to the point you care about NONE of these characters. You only want them to die because all you can think about is how WOKE they must be to have gotten their roles

If you happen to care about such lofty things like coherent storytelling or character development, I’d wait to watch this lazy entry into the zombie genre until you’re either drunk or stoned to overlook its many problems.

This is quite possibly the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It was so bad that, for the half hour I watched it, I got a headache from gritting my teeth in disgust.

Warning : contains a disturbing amount of wokeness.

The worst movie of all time. I don’t know why netflix make movies anymore.

Watched the movie in small chunks of 5-10 minutes and then got bored and went back to reading tax auditing reports

The only reason I actually kept on watching this movie is to write down a detailed awful review of it but it just backfired because I can’t possibly describe how bad this movie is no matter what I write.

Every – and I mean EVERY – scene is a fail, the jokes don’t land ANYWHERE and on top of all that painfully dreadful script and directing there is an effort being made for social commentary about PC culture and veganism? Someone needs to retire already. I’m looking at you Mr Snyder.

Watch this irreverent Army of the Dead “pitch meeting,” and you’ll get the idea (warning: Spoilers):

If you subscribe to Netflix and you’re a fan of the zombie genre, check out Kingdom, despite the fact that it is a Netflix production. This is a superb, two-season (so far) series about a zombie outbreak in feudal Korea.

Or you could check out Black Summer, a gritty, contemporary series created by the Z Nation showrunners.

Amazon Prime has many direct-to-video or quasi-direct-to video zombie flicks. Be advised that quality is very variable.