Army Of The Dead

And Employment After Prison

I’ll give Zack Snyder a little credit for crafting an enjoyable zombie movie out of “Dawn Of The Dead”. Sure, he surgically removed all the subtext from the original and turned it all into a braindead action movie, but it worked. It’s unfortunate that he wasn’t yet done with zombies, and in fact “Army Of The Dead” was a project he was pursuing for a good long time. Because he fails upwards, Netflix was somehow willing to push his “Army Of The Dead” cinematic universe, which, as of now, includes a prequel I will not see. Free of big studio meddling, Snyder went and made something completely untethered by concessions to reality, humanity, sense, and sometimes fun.

This involves a post-apocalyptic setting, in that Las Vegas has been overrun by zombies and quarantined off following a fatal virus. We see Dave Bautista in the opening credits during a failed mercenary mission, tragically losing his wife during this bit of storytelling, because Snyder wants to do it all in this opening: he wants to set the stage, he wants to convey an arc, and he wants to kill key characters, as well as feature a few zombie “gags”. These ideas are all poorly contrasted with each other, but they’re also considerably divorced from the main purpose of including zombies in your story, which is to be scary. It’s all to get to the unlikely visual of muscled-up Dave Bautista as a fry cook.

That leads us to the “offer he can’t refuse” section. Hiroyuki Sanada plays a wealthy businessman who proposes a massive heist, robbing a vault in Vegas just before the government nukes the entire area. Naturally, everything about this is suspect: the job itself, the idea that Vegas will be nuked, Sanada himself. As a character who has conducted several military-level missions, Bautista says yes anyway. So we get to see him assemble a team of middling to unimpressive character actors, because Zack Snyder typically casts interesting faces that largely can’t act.

The question persists all throughout this movie: why do we need zombies? I feel as if I’m always being a pessimist about these things. Zombies in “Army Of The Dead” are meant to be emblematic of a small society that has been lost and forgotten, pushed away by civilization, turning them feral. In turn, they have begun to evolve, so these zombies actually have an elaborate caste system and method of behavior. When we meet them here, they have even begun to breed.

Summing up: you’ve placed zombies in the middle of your movie as a danger. And then you had them evolve to the point where they’re nearly human. So why not just use humans? You have a decimated, isolated population that has been neglected by the government. Would it be a surprise if they went feral and grew dangerous? Zack Snyder is smart enough to know this actually happens to people, this actually happens to some cultures. It’s sort of like how Hollywood will make a movie about bigotry, but not towards minorities, just towards, like, witches or goblins, because Metaphor. I’m sure this might be lost on Snyder. This is not a guy who does Metaphor.

Most of “Army Of The Dead” is loud, meandering, stuck within its own A to B plotting. There are a couple of impressive action… I wanna say scenarios?... but they don’t make for full sequences where you are convinced there are real stakes. Bautista is arguably the most powerful weapon the movie has. The former wrestler has grown into a subtle actor who compliments his own considerable physical presence with an emotional sensitivity. He’s a long way from showing up as a wordless henchman in “Spectre”. He gets scenes with an impulsive daughter (Ella Purnell) who is too headstrong to listen to Dad’s warnings, and it is believable that there is a bond, and that he is dedicated to it. Contrast that with Dwayne Johnson, who has done movies where his characters have daughters, and it is always as if one actor has just met the other for the first time. If Bautista is nailing this in rehearsals, then that is an impressive dedication to the nuances of his craft. If it’s something developed between camera set-ups on location, then Bautista (as well as Purnell) are actors to be taken seriously. Contrast that with Tig Notaro, a very funny comedienne who, playing the helicopter pilot, seems entirely divorced from the events and gravity of the film on-hand. Which makes sense; she was edited into the film once it was completed, replacing another actor accused of sexual misconduct. But if you told me half of this cast was edited into this movie once it was finished, I would believe that too.

The implication early on in the film is that, in the wake of a failed operation, the only job Bautista’s character can get is as a fry chef. This was familiar considering the struggles people who are incarcerated face when they get out of prison. What you have heard is true. In many states, jobs are no longer allowed to ask if someone has a criminal record. However, this is largely irrelevant in many jobs, where a background check is still required. I acquired a job while living in a halfway house, and I was open about my criminal history, so somehow I passed their background check. However, it is also a job that violates many labor regulations.

As I have mentioned previously, halfway houses (which operate with, but independent of, prisons) once had a priority to assist residents in finding and then keeping a job. This effort would be repaid as the halfway house would garnish a portion of the wages of residents. During COVID, due to the difficulty in finding work, the houses no longer garnished said wages. Years later, that remains the policy, which means you can’t look towards staff to help you find work. In my halfway house, they had relationships with maybe three or four factories, and they would just send inmates there by the vanload. Re-Entry Services (independent of the halfway house) offered a couple other options, but they were also factories recruiting by the identical vanload. It took five months to receive these offers, sometimes only to interview. I had to track down my own employment, thanks to job websites like ZipRecruiter.

These shortcomings arrive from those in a halfway house in a more urban area. But it very much seems that no matter where you are, it’s going to be factories and construction and all sorts of manual labor. It’s also going to be an issue with finding housing. Whatever the law says, I have been denied housing due to a criminal record. I found a place to live with a landlord that would have me, but he ended up trying to extort me ten months into my lease. Finding an escape hatch from that scenario meant requiring another loved one to sign a lease on my behalf. Many ex-cons do not have the same luxury.