Matthias Schweighöfer

  • Army of Thieves (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, June 2022) All right, let’s go full fanboy mode: I was absolutely not interested in any sequel, prequel, interquel or whateverquel having to do with zombie heist film Army of the Dead – an overblown production that had a lot of ideas but very little discipline in executing them. But a romantic heist comedy starring Nathalie Emmanuel? Great genre, cute actress, say no more: I’m there with no questions asked. I’ve been crushing hard on Emmanuel since Game of Thrones (the fate of her character partially explains why I soured on the last season of the series), and seeing her get a good supporting role in the ongoing Fast and Furious series is an ongoing delight. But here, she gets nothing less than a full lead role – and, in a delightful bit of fan-service, a brand-new fancy hairstyle every time the film skips ahead a few hours. In this heist film, she plays the mastermind who seduces our nerdy protagonist (director-star Matthias Schweighöfer) into four daring bank robberies, each of them targeting vaults built by a near-mythical craftsman. (A fifth vault is the one tackled in Army of the Dead if you’re wondering about the link between the two films.)  The weakest aspect of Army of Thieves is the zombie background noise meant to make the film more interesting to zombie fans – considering that I didn’t want a zombie film, this was counterproductive. It’s far more interesting when it delves into this funhouse portrait of safecrackers and thieves thirsting for great scores for the fun and accomplishment of it rather than the money. With a joyously European setting, the film zips through a few set-pieces and character moments. It’s not that good – there’s a sense that it’s a good imitation of better films, but not anything more. There’s also a lessening of tension toward the end (culminating in a forgone but contrived conclusion) but it’s not a fatal flaw: if you’re a romantic heist comedy fan (and who isn’t?), the film delivers the goods. Emmanuel is superb from beginning to end, and she gets a run for her money from Ruby O. Fee as a tech expert. I’m more than willing to ignore Army of Thieves’ links with Army of the Dead and pretend that our lead couple will find a happy ending in an eventual sequel. (Considering the films’ mentions of time loops and precognition, I wouldn’t necessarily bet against it.)  Army of Thieves delivers exactly what I expected, and even throws in a few bonuses while it’s at it. There’s a lot to say about those breezy, unassuming mid-tier films if they strike their target audience’s fancy, especially if it means going fanboy for two hours.

  • Army of the Dead (2021)

    Army of the Dead (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, May 2021) On paper, Army of the Dead sounds pretty good: blending a casino heist film with a post-apocalyptic zombie-infested setting is reasonably newish and certainly a great fit for writer-director Zack Snyder’s filmography. Unfortunately, there’s always a “but…” or two to any Snyder project, and this one is certainly no exception. The core of the film is fine — present Las Vegas as a zombie-infested zone on the verge of being nuked, assemble a team hyped to be able to do the heist, drop them in the zone, have them fight out various dangers, suffer the inevitable betrayal, whittle their numbers down and have the survivors narrowly escape the impending nuclear explosion. Good bones on that story, and Snyder sometimes knows how to make it look great. It’s the rest that doesn’t quite work. After a dynamite opening sequence cramming an entire film’s worth of exposition (and two or three low-budget movies’ production expenses) in five minutes, Army of the Dead gets down to business and almost immediately gets weird. And I don’t mean weird as in quirky, atmospheric or eccentric, but weird as in indulging in excess, puzzling tangents, extraneous bits of worldbuilding and elements that are far less interesting than they should have been (namely, the “Alphas” smart zombies). The most charitable explanation that has been provided for all this is that Army of the Dead is the first chunk of a more expansive imaginary universe that may expand to include aliens, robots, time-travel, parallel universes and (depressingly, once again…) a complete zombie takeover of the Earth. Maybe. [October 2021: First spinoff Army of Thieves, which I preferred to Army of the Dead, offers some support for this theory.]  But it does make the film a bit vexing to watch, as its overinflated running time keeps diverging in tangents. (But not all tangents are bad: the tiger zombie? Terrific.)  Other areas of the film are disappointing for more familiar reasons: Snyder likes gore a lot more than I do, and his sense of story is often deficient — witness the dumb ways team members are taken out. But at least we’re on more familiar ground with those issues. At least things are handled with a decent amount of energy and some appropriate actors in key roles. Dave Bautista is rarely less than charismatic and this time is no exception, Matthias Schweighöfer is a bit of an audience stand-in between obvious action heroes, and while Tig Notaro was added to the film during post-production (replacing a problematic actor via CGI and careful editing), she ends up being one of the clear highlights. It all adds up to a film that delivers the goods, but is held back in many ways from going beyond that. Worse than that is the feeling that Army of the Dead, like far too many corporate products of the 2010s and beyond, is incomplete by design — we may get the full story later if the vagaries of the market allow for it, or we may never do. (Or by the time it’s delivered, it may have mutated into something else.) But so it is in today’s mass-market movie industry: have a bite now, stay hungry for more. Just once I’d like a story with a resolution, a zombie film where they’re all destroyed in the end, a Snyder film I could just enjoy without going “but…”