Following a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas, a group of mercenaries take the ultimate gamble, venturing into the quarantine zone to pull off the greatest heist ever attempted.

Zack Snyder’s first entirely new film since 2017’s compromised Justice League cut is a return to zombies for the director, who made his debut with 2004’s excellent Dawn of the Dead remake. Sadly, this overlong and overly familiar zombie movie isn’t a patch on his previous adventure, but there’s enough here to satisfy an undemanding, late night horror craving.

The opening scene features squaddies transporting a top secret payload, which gets unleashed when the convoy collides with a honeymooning couple’s car. An uber zombie escapes, attacking the military crew before descending on Las Vegas. Sin City is soon surrounded by nearly 4,000 containers to keep the zombies within, and a low yield nuclear missile planned to wipe out everyone within the perimeter.

Against this premise, with a ticking clock, military man Scott Ward (Dave Bautista, Guardians of the Galaxy) is approached to lead a team into the Vegas fortress and recover $20m from a casino vault. This is his opportunity to get out of a dead end job and to build bridges with his estranged daughter, Kate (Ella Purnell, Miss Peregrine’s School for Peculiar Children). So far, so cliched characters, and once he’s got his crew assembled, they’re traversing a new world of zombie tigers and desiccated showgirls.

The alpha zombie wears a bulletproof helmet and struts around like an Orc warlord from The Hobbit, but at least is a variation on the regular, nondescript, faceless zombie. Unfortunately, the other stock characters – the badass female weapons expert, the man from the company – feel like they’ve been culled from Aliens, with other plot points that look towards James Cameron’s 1986 Alien sequel. From the man who’s secretly trying to catch a monster on the company’s behalf, to the creeping through a room without waking the sleeping creatures, to a rooftop rescue and final confrontation with the big bad – it’s all too recognisable. Deja vu reigns.

It’s still a load of fun, but at just under 2.5 hours it’s a good 40 minutes longer than it needs to be. There’s none of Snyder’s incessant slo-mo effects to slow things down even more, and the cast are all solid and game for the gory adventure set pieces. A zombie version of Ocean’s Eleven is a nice idea, it just all gets weighed down with too many characters and a desire to go deep when there’s little need to do so.

Verdict: A bloated heist caper with added zombies. It’s explosive fun for those who like taking pot shots at the walking dead in first person shoot-em-ups, but zombie white tiger aside (Siegfried and Roy will be very upset) there’s nothing here to distinguish this from its peers in an already saturated genre. 7/10

Nick Joy