A muscle-bound crew of mercenaries infiltrate a Las Vegas full of zombies in Snyder’s uninspired Netflix horror-thriller

Zombies. They grunt. They lurch inelegantly through dystopian ruined streets, sometimes breaking into an athletic sprint. They stare sightlessly ahead, often with irises that glitter in the post-apocalyptic sunset with some nameless infection. Sometimes they shriek through hideously distorted mouths from which the flesh has already been half-eaten away, as they are blasted with a shotgun. They provide metaphors for consumerism and conformism, and they also furnish a low-budget horror launching pad for ambitious young directors. But zombies are often just boring: yucky and indistinguishable horror-vermin whose gruesome killing, in each case, is a dramatically uninteresting non-moment, and all too often humourless (although an honourable exception is Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead).

And so it proves in this very long, very violent, video-game type horror-thriller from Zack Snyder. The premise is that, in a future-world in which a zombie outbreak has been contained by herding the shambling undead into a wrecked Las Vegas and walling them in, a tough Dirty Dozen-type crew is hired by a shadowy Vegas hotel owner (Hiroyuki Sanada) to bust into the city and retrieve the billions of dollars languishing in his hotel safe. The zombie slayers are led by man-mountain Scott (Dave Bautista), who is quaintly yearning for a non-mercenary retirement selling lobster rolls in his food truck, and include Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick), Cruz (Ana De La Reguera), Lily (Nora Arnezeder) and Scott’s sensitive daughter Kate (Ella Purnell), who is still hurting from a tough decision that Scott had to make when Kate’s mum was bitten by a zombie.