Army of Thieves
A quintet of crooks has four days to crack three safes in Europe while a zombie apocalypse rages in Nevada. Huh?
In safe hands?: Matthias Schweighöfer
N.B. Army of Thieves is not a zombie apocalypse epic. While there’s a zombie apocalypse streaming on the news, the outbreak is confined to Nevada. Even so, this madcap Netflix action-comedy is the second instalment in Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead franchise, itself a ‘re-imagining’ of George A. Romero’s zombie-infused Dawn of the Dead (1978). So one would expect the odd suppurating revenant. Not so – although the film’s protagonist, Sebastian, dreams of a few. Sebastian Schlencht-Wöhnert is a nerdy German bank teller from Potsdam who worships the operas of Wagner and happens to be an intuitively brilliant safecracker…
The central premise of the film is not without promise, tapping into the mechanistic wonders of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. As the story goes, a Munich locksmith called Hans Wagner once devoted his later years to designing four intricately impenetrable safes, the mechanisms of each based on a narrative from Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle. Thus, he named these Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. As the eyes of the world are fixed on the zombie issue in Nevada, an army of thieves – well, four, to be precise – plan to break into the first three of the safes in a four-day window: in Paris, Prague and St. Moritz. So, when the brains behind the operation, Gwendoline Starr (Nathalie Emmanuel), stumbles across Sebastian’s overlooked YouTube video, she casts a honey trap to draw him into the triple-heist…
Unlike many other films of its ilk, Army of Thieves is played for guffaws, which rather undermines the comedy. A French Interpol agent called Delacroix (Jonathan Cohen), proves increasingly incompetent and unhinged by the minute, but he’s no Inspector Clouseau. The lion’s share of the real laughs come from the film’s star, Matthias Schweighöfer, who is also the producer-director. With a running joke mocking the unpronounceable surname of his character, Sebastian Schlencht-Wöhnert could be an alter ego for the director. Sebastian screams a lot, injures his fist when applying it to the nose of a rival and repeatedly spills scalding coffee over himself. Conversely, his testosterone-spilling rival looks like Hugh Jackman on a bad night and goes by the name of Brad Cage, a sobriquet cobbled together from Brad Pitt and Nic Cage.
Both weirdly inventive and wildly derivative, Army of Thieves recalls something Jean-Pierre Jeunet might have concocted for Luc Besson. The picturesque locales are to die for, while the mechanics of the plot mirror the genius of its imaginary muse. It’s not every day one encounters a heist comedy referencing the Norse operas of Wagner set against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Matthias Schweighöfer, Nathalie Emmanuel, Ruby O. Fee, Stuart Martin, Guz Khan, Jonathan Cohen, Noémie Nakai, Christian Steyer, Trent Garrett, Barbara Meier, Dave Bautista, Ana de la Reguera.
Dir Matthias Schweighöfer, Pro Deborah Snyder, Zack Snyder, Wesley Coller, Dan Maag and Matthias Schweighöfer, Screenplay Shay Hatten, from a story by Zack nyder and Shay Hatten, Ph Bernhard Jasper, Pro Des Christian Eisele, Ed Alexander Berner, Music Steve Mazzaro and Hans Zimmer, Costumes Stephanie Portnoy Porter.
The Stone Quarry/Pantaleon Films-Netflix.
128 mins. USA/Germany. 2021. Rel: 29 October 2021. Cert. 15
