Review: Army of Thieves Can’t Crack Why It’s More than a Franchise Obligation

Matthias Schweighöfer never imbues the act of turning the dial on a combination lock with tension, intrigue, or variation.

Army of Thieves
Photo: Netflix

Given the world’s response to Covid-19 over the last year and a half, one imagines that during the first stages of a zombie pandemic, everyday life would remain more or less the same. While news footage of the undead eviscerating the living in some other part of the world was running in the background at bars and airports, people would likely still go about their everyday business—and, according to Army of Thieves, master criminals would still plan their multistage bank heists. Setting its action in Western Europe and thus pushing the outbreak of zombism in Las Vegas to its margins, Matthias Schweighöfer’s film puts itself in a box, consistently failing to justify why its story deserves our attention more than the spectacle of the recently deceased rising to feast upon the flesh of the living.

This prequel to Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead centers that film’s irrepressibly German safecracker, Ludwig Dieter (Schweighöfer). In both films, Dieter’s characterization doesn’t go far beyond a sub-SNL portrayal of Germanness as a comic personality quirk, defined mostly by an extreme self-consciousness in appearance and manner—and, of course, a language inscrutable to outsiders. Here, though, it’s revealed that “Ludwig Dieter” is actually a nom de guerre for Sebastian Schlencht-Wöhnert, a much less Anglo-friendly name. This name change is also the sort of needless background information that substitutes for character development in the world of big-budget prequels, akin to the explanation of Han Solo’s last name in Solo: A Star Wars Story, only here we get tired jokes about German phonetics.

An innocent low-level bureaucrat living in Potsdam, Germany, Sebastian begins the film as a wholly inexperienced but seemingly preternaturally gifted safecracker. When the pickpocket Gwendoline (Nathalie Emmanuel) sees Sebastian’s obsessive vlog entry about four safes constructed in the 19th century and named after the four operas in Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, she sends him an anonymous invitation to try out for her gang of thieves.

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Sebastian, of course, passes the safecracking tournament with ease. As a result, he’s welcomed into Gwendoline’s crew, which could really only be considered an army if, say, you needed to brand Army of Thieves in a way that ties it to Army of the Dead. Gwendoline and the rest of her entourage—strong man Brad (Stuart Martin), hacker Korinna (Ruby O. Fee), and their driver, Rolph (Guz Khan)—have in their sights precisely the safes that have obsessed Sebastian, though Gwendoline is the only one who shares his belief that they’re quasi-mythical objects, a kind of spiritual reward waiting at the end of a hero’s quest.

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A three-part heist dominates the rest of the film, with the stakes and difficulty supposedly rising for each successive sting. But Schweighöfer, whose Sebastian is the focal point during these robberies, never imbues the act of turning the dial on a combination lock with tension, intrigue, or variation. Each time Sebastian gets to a safe and rests his ear against it, we get what seems like the same roving CGI shot of gears turning and eventually locking into place.

Army of Thieves as a brand-expanding enterprise is devoid of the kind of specificity that might provide a sense of its own unique identity, in addition to being bogged down by its obligatory ties to Army of the Dead. The stock characters, repetitive action sequences, and markedly sketchy connection to Snyder’s film hardly make it feel like the story has been sufficiently fleshed out to stand alone, or even to dovetail in a satisfying way with its predecessor. In Army of the Dead, we’re led to assume that every single member of the ragtag heist crew has taken on the job because of the immense financial rewards that it promises to bring them. But the motivation that Army of Thieves retroactively packs onto Sebastian’s participation in the later heist feels extraneous and out of step with the earlier film’s irreverence.

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While watching Army of Thieves, it’s hard to avoid the impression that one is dealing with the absolute nadir of the sort of franchise logic that currently dominates Hollywood. This expansion of a purported new Netflix franchise consists of a rehash of heist-movie clichés probably too simplistic to even serve as children’s entertainment yet still manages to be utterly inscrutable in terms of its import for the larger story world—in short, its entire reason for existence. The one puzzle that can’t be easily cracked by Sebastian turning a dial for a few seconds turns out to be justifying why anybody would want to watch him do it.

Score: 
 Cast: Matthias Schweighöfer, Nathalie Emmanuel, Stuart Martin, Ruby O. Fee, Guz Khan, Jonathan Cohen, Noémie Nakai  Director: Matthias Schweighöfer  Screenwriter: Shay Hatten  Distributor: Netflix  Running Time: 127 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

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