“Army of Thieves” has major “him?!” energy, and that’s part of the charm, for a little while at least. Of all the bad-asses and gritty heroes introduced in Zack Snyder’s Netflix zombie epic “Army of the Dead,” played by the likes of Dave Bautista, Omari Hardwick, Ana de la Reguera, Ella Purnell, the last character you’d expect to get a prequel-spin-off was the harmless German safecracker Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer), him with his high-pitched squeals whenever zombies were near. The behind-the-scenes story goes that when Snyder was making “Army of the Dead,” he knew that he wanted to have a prequel, but that it was Schweighöfer’s performance as Dieter that helped the concept come together, along with Snyder’s desire to tell a heist story like “The Italian Job.” Good thing that Schweighöfer is an experienced writer/director/star with his own cinematic chutzpah, some of which is on display in this amusing, but quickly forgettable star vehicle.
Schweighöfer’s biggest film yet continues the formidable, Steve Carell-inspired comedic work that includes some of the dorky European charm of the original character—those screams, his clumsiness, his boyish innocence mixed with some broken English—and framing all those features even more as underdog’s DNA. But before entering a generic story that is also Dieter’s greatest adventure yet, he’s presented as a man named Sebastian (the Dieter explanation coming later): a posh, safe-cracking German man-boy who geeks out over the work of a vault-maker named Hans Wagner, and posts videos on a YouTube page that gets zero views. Sebastian is awkward, in a way that’s not cute-awkward, it’s just awkward, and a little sad. That, in turn, makes him a little endearing.
Sebastian is the guy most likely to be bullied by a sentient Zack Snyder movie, so it’s kind of silly that “Army of Thieves” even exists. But the major flaw in this case is not embracing that very inspired silliness while embracing the tight, twisty thrills a heist story demands. The story here, which has a Snyder co-story credit, alongside writer Shay Hatten, only starts with some spark when naive Sebastian finds himself in the middle of an underground safe cracking competition, which is about as goofy as it sounds, shot with some wild angles like dance competition or a rap battle. People cheer on different cartoonish opponents, and Sebastian, confident in his delicate touch, doesn’t lose. But this moment only makes way for a massive cliche, of a rag-tag team coming together for a few big missions, in which everyone serves a purpose to steal from three massive vaults made by Sebastian’s idol, Hans Wagner (whose massive vaults were inspired by operas by Richard Wagner, no relation).
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Schweighöfer is charismatic enough in a role that stretches his knack for a decent chuckle to the limit, but it’s every other major character in this part of the universe that shows the script’s formulaic tendencies not inventing, just borrowing. It’s not the actors aren’t intriguing, but that their roles aren’t fleshed out, like Nathalie Emmanuel’s Gwendoline, who is meant to have her own agency as a bad-ass heist manager, but spends a great deal of the movie just listening to Sebastian talk, or being shoved into a love story that feels more obligatory than anything else. Other characters are only sketched out, like Ruby O. Fee’s sassy hacker Korina, or Guz Khan’s sandwich-loving getaway driver Rolph. The biggest comedic loss is a character named Brad Cage (Stuart Martin), a reference to the heavy’s desire to be like the ‘90s action movies he’s obsessed with. The joke isn’t that funny by premise, but it’s more that the script doesn’t even try to pursue it, despite all of the easy material about Nicolas Cage or Brad’s beloved film, a bonafide classic, “Con-Air.”
To add insult to a growing boredom, the quartet is being chased by painfully wholesale Interpol agents Delacroix (Jonathan Cohen) and Beatrix (Noémie Nakai). The story tries to counter this typical cat-and-mouse air by noting how the team aren’t doing usual heists, they’re hungrier for vault-breaking bragging rights more than the money inside. That’s a subversive idea that’s still not believable enough in the plotting, just like the throwaway lines that comment on how the mild heist happening in this movie is just like something that would happen in a movie.
It all creates a bit of a void where the film should be its most exciting, watching Sebastian’s superpowers at play, cracking safes that have millions and later trillions of combination possibilities. The script never quite cracks how to make these scenes anything more superficial, as much as it does keep them busy—Sebastian visualizes a flashy labyrinth of intricate gears as he gently turns dials, all while Richard and Hans Wagner-splaining to Gwendoline. If someone ranting about Richard Wagner’s operas for pages of dialogue sounds like fun, without a hint of how problematic the German composer was, this is your new favorite Zack Snyder joint. But endorsement of a mighty anti-Semitic figure aside, these scenes are a missed opportunity to even feign presenting safe-cracking as a unique, hard-earned skill.
Schweighöfer proves to have a sharper, more promising directorial eye when it comes to a couple chases, or bits of hand-to-hand combat that give the otherwise lackluster story a needed jolt. They’re also the moments this movie most owes to Snyder’s visual vocabulary, like slow-motion action shots that create bloody slapstick; non-lethal violence that looks cool, and looks like it hurts. And it’s always jarring, and exciting, when the camera suddenly goes first-person, immersing the viewer in a chaotic, skull-bashing fist-fight. Schweighöfer thanks “The Snyder Universe” in the end credits, and he should also thank Snyder’s “Sucker Punch” in particular.
Amidst the “Italian Job”-lite action, and some throwaway jokes about dorky Sebastian spilling hot coffee on himself and then screaming as if he were on fire, “Army of Thieves” reminds us of what lies ahead in the storyline of “Army of the Dead.” Sebastian has nightmares about being eaten by zombies, which are inflamed any time he catches news footage about how bad the outbreak is in America. These beats initially pepper in some funny fatalism to what we’re watching, but also play with unwritten rules about prequels playing with genre. As producer Deborah Snyder points out in this film’s press notes, no one has really done a prequel in a different genre before. But that puts “Army of Thieves” even more in the shadow of “Army of the Dead,” with the former clearly struggling to be as kooky overall as the latter. There’s something to making a prequel just for the hell of it, and giving it to an actor/writer/director whose charisma has worldwide appeal, but “Army of Thieves” could have had much more fun with the assignment. [C]
“Army of Thieves” hits Netflix on October 29.