Army of the Dead’s Biggest Plot Holes

With zombie movies it’s sometimes best to leave your brains at the door – and Army of the Dead has some plot holes that are especially hard to ignore. Directed by Zack Snyder, Army of the Dead is a horror/heist movie that sends a team of zombie-killing experts (and one guy who’s good at opening safes) into the heart of undead-infested Las Vegas to retrieve $200 million from a casino vault.

Army of the Dead‘s intrepid crew includes Scott Ward (Dave Bautista), his old friends Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick) and Maria (Ana de la Reguera), social media star Mikey Guzman (Raúl Castillo) and his friend Chambers (Samantha Win), helicopter pilot Marianne Peters (Tig Notaro) and safe-breaker Ludwig Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer). Also thrown into the mix are suspicious company man Martin (Garret Dillahunt), local coyote Lilly (Nora Arnezeder), Scott’s daughter Kate (Ella Purnell) and Cummings (Theo Rossi), a guard at the neighboring refugee camp.

Between a zombie tiger, a zombie Elvis impersonator, and the entirely unexplained robot zombies, there’s a lot going on in Army of the Dead. But while it’s entirely possible to enjoy it on the merits of its action, humor, and creative zombie kills, its plot holes mean that the storyline doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny.

The Heist Was Pointless

A mid-movie reveal about Martin’s true intentions raises more questions than it answers. After locking the rest of the crew in the casino basement with a horde of attacking zombies, Martin gleefully tells Lilly that his boss, Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) was never interested in getting the money out at all. What Tanaka was really after was the head of the alpha zombie queen, which Martin had removed earlier and stashed in his bag. Martin explains that an intact zombie head and brain are worth ten times the contents of the vault to governments and black market buyers who want to create their own zombies. The entire heist was just a ruse to get Martin into the city with enough zombie-killing experts around him to ensure his survival.

This dastardly double-cross doesn’t actually make much sense at all. For starters, the alpha zombie queen approaches the group almost as soon as they enter the city walls, and later in the movie Martin takes the queen down with only Lilly’s help and easily retrieves the head. It seems as though he could have very easily just taken the head at the start of the mission and been in and out of the city in 15 minutes, with no need for an elaborate heist. But even if Tanaka wanted to do the heist as a cover story for the team he sent in, so they didn’t suspect what he was really after, Martin double-crossing the team was pointless and defeated the whole purpose of bringing them in the first place. Had he simply gone to the roof with the rest of them, he could have gotten out with the concealed head and Tanaka’s cash as a nice bonus. By instead choosing to make a run for it on foot (with a nuclear bomb approaching, no less) he lost two heads: the zombie queen’s, and his own.

Everyone Giving Up On Chambers

After being double-crossed by Martin in the first act of Army of the Dead, Chambers defies all the odds by single-handedly fighting her way through a mass of zombies. Just when it seems all hope for her is lost, she bursts through a window just a small distance down the hall from Guzman and the rest of the crew. But despite the fact that there’s only a small handful of the undead between Chambers and the others, this team of highly-trained zombie-slayers don’t make any attempt whatsoever to try and help her. Even Guzman, who has previously been seen slaying half a dozen zombies without breaking a sweat and scoring a triple headshot with a single bullet, just stares slack-jawed instead of taking aim. He eventually fires a single bullet, and then gives up. If Army of the Dead‘s script called for Chambers to die, her actual death scene should have been made to look a whole lot less easily escapable.

The Uncrackable Vault

Between the feathered dart booby traps and the trap that comedically squishes a zombie between two moving walls, Bly Tanaka clearly bought his safe from the Acme Corporation. Still, even allowing for considerable suspension of disbelief, the safe’s design is somewhat laughable. Dieter adds a few scribbles to the door to suggest a level of complexity, but ultimately the track to cracking this unbreakable safe is to press his ear up against it and turn the dials until he hears the lock mechanism click. Even Wile E. Coyote would ask for a refund.

Transporting The Money

Action movies can be expected to forgo some of the more boring rules of physics, so one aspect of heist movies that’s often overlooked is the challenge of physically transporting millions of dollars in cash. While the Army of the Dead crew plan to carry the $200 million out of the vault and to the roof in a single trip using duffel bags, moving that much money would actually be an extremely long and gruelling task. The $200 million is comprised of hundred dollar bills, which weigh a gram each, so the total weight of the money would be slightly over 4,409 lbs. With eight people pitching in, that amounts to each person having to carry 551 lbs of money from the vault to the helicopter – considerably more than a duffel bag or three.

Of course, this particular plot hole could be explained away by the fact that none of the crew are experienced bank robbers, and Bly Tanaka never cared about them getting out with the money. Between the impending nuclear bomb and the arrival of a horde of zombies, the Army of the Dead crew never actually have to fully reckon with the logistics of moving that much cash.

Time Makes No Sense

Vanderohe’s speech speculating that the crew are actually stuck in a time loop may have been Snyder’s way of lampshading how completely skewed time is in Army of the Dead. There’s already a surprising lack of urgency when the team learn that a nuke will be hitting in 90 minutes instead of 24 hours. But it’s after they crack the vault and Scott says “We got about 20 minutes before this place is dust” that the time-bending becomes truly wild. Around 30 minutes of screen time actually pass before the nuke hits, during which time the characters act with no sense of urgency at all. Kate runs to the Olympus hotel to search for Geeta, while Scott slowly battles his way to the top of the Bly casino. He then somehow finds time to take a detour to the Olympus and conduct his own search for Kate. And even after they’re finally reunited and the helicopter is ready to go, the characters are in no hurry to get on it. Time must work differently in Zombieland.

Geeta’s Fate

After being the driving force for Kate’s decision to join the heist crew, and her decision to sneak away 20 minutes before a nuke hit the city, Geeta’s (Huma Qureshi) death ultimately happens off-screen. It’s not acknowledged by Kate, and is only confirmed by Scott telling Kate she can use his stashed money to get Geeta’s kids out of the refugee camp. The lack of closure for Geeta’s storyline was likely due to Chris D’Elia, who originally played the crew’s helicopter pilot, being replaced with Tig Notaro in post-production. Since Geeta climbs into the helicopter’s cockpit, most of the footage of Qureshi in the following scene likely had D’Elia in shot – and the same was probably true for her death scene. Whatever the reason for it, Geeta’s quiet disappearance from the movie feels out of place considering how important she was to Kate.

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Hannah Shaw-Williams
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Hannah has been with Screen Rant since 2013, covering news, features, movie premieres, Comic-Con and more! You can follow her on Twitter @HSW3K

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