The only good thing about Zack Snyder's masturbatory exercise Army of the Dead, is that it's comparatively shorter than his version of Justice League – but what movie isn't? An hour and a half short of a four-hour movie is still too long, especially considering that if everything we've seen before were edited out of the film, AotD would be a short feature.

True, we may not have seen a heist/zombie apocalypse movie, but we've seen dozens of heists and dozens of zombie apocalypses, and bringing the two genres together only serves to highlight the inconsistencies of each. But, let us start at the beginning. A US military convoy is transporting an unknown cargo from Area 51. The two soldiers in the cab of the truck debate the contents of the box (“the original draft of the Constitution written in the blood of the Founding Fathers… Amelia Earhart, long live ", etc.). Whatever it is, it’s highly inflammable, judging by how the truck instantly turns into a huge ball of fire the moment it makes contact with a considerably smaller vehicle.

Actually it is some kind of superhuman zombie that kills a bunch of soldiers and infects two of them. This entire scenario could easily have unfolded without the arbitrary and random explosion; the gigantic fireball is here solely because Snyder is such an impatient director that, in a 140-minute film, he can't wait even five minutes before blowing something to bits – the cinematic equivalent of premature ejaculation.

On the other hand, Snyder takes his time on plot points that we all know by heart. Hero is offered a job. Hero turns down job. Hero changes his mind and takes the job. Hero assembles team. And so on and so forth. So as to leave no cliché unused, the hero also has an estranged daughter, Kate (Ella Purnell); this, however, deserves some more attention.

Kate works in a quarantine camp for zombies, which is nothing short of a logic-defying concept. It is first established that the zombie bite takes immediate effect, transforming the victim into another zombie – and one does not quarantine a zombie; one shoots a zombie in the head and moves on.

Now, it has always been a habit of zombie movies to play fast and loose, depending on the requirements of the script, with the time it takes for a bite to kick in, but two wrongs don’t make a right. All things considered, AotD is a rip-off that makes it a point of ripping off bad ideas – which might be all right if it were a parody, but the movie is too bloated and excessive to ever be able to take itself lightly.