Battle of the Damned (2013)
Nomination Year: 2024
SYNOPSIS: This is an Escape from New York rip-off with Dolph Lundgren in the Kurt Russel role. Megacorporate bioweapon testing has unleashed the zombie apocalypse on an unnamed Asian city. The local army has cordoned off the city to contain the plague, leaving zombies and survivors alike trapped inside to die. But one of those trapped is the daughter of the megacorp's CEO, so he hires Major Max Gatling (Dolph) to lead a team of mercenaries to drop into the city and rescue her. With a set up like that and Dolph chewing the scenery, this movie should be a ton of fun. It is not. This movie takes itself way too seriously. It imagines it is The Walking Dead or 28 Days Later. It is not. It is as dull, plodding, and formulaic as you can imagine. From the first five minutes, you can predict the entire plot: Dolph's team getting killed or wounded and having to be evaced, leaving him to proceed on his own; the cultlike survivor enclave with the creepy leader who likes the apocalypse just fine, thank you very much; their sudden yet inevitable betrayal of Dolph; the daughter's rescue of him; the sudden yet inevitable zombie attack on their "impregnable" base. All yawningly predictable in every plodding step. Director Christopher Hatton even manages to suck all the fun out of Dolph's performance. (Oh, and the setup also means that all the characters with agency -- heroes and villains both -- are white, while the faceless zombie hordes are Asian. I should be more outraged by this than I am but A) Minotaur kinda burned out my capacity for outrage; B) outrage would involve this movie being engaging enough to inspire an emotional reaction, which it isn't; and C) this feels a lot more not thinking through the optics of cheap Malaysian filming location and local extras than an intentional statement by the filmmakers.) And then, 54 minutes in, this dull, plodding, paint-by-numbers zombie movie goes completely batshit crazy (see What?! clip). It's not enough to make the movie actually fun, but it at least kept me from nodding off for the last half hour.
Greg Pearson
