Battle of the Damned (2013)

Another one and half hour scifi movie. It can be called scifi because zombies has scientific explanation and there are robots. That kind of sums the movie. But I think I should write longer review.

Dolph Lundgren is sent to zombie infested city to rescue daughter of rich industrialist. First ten minutes are pretty much Dolph and his group killing endless hordes of running zombies. Even actors seemed to think it was stupid. They didn't put much effort into fighting scenes. There are few mandatory deaths and lot of killing of zombies. If zombies were counted as people and rest of the movie was similar to beginning Dolph would have broken record of most kills in one movie with big margin.

After ten minutes Dolph let other survivors of his group to leave. All one. Then we cut to daughter who is one of few survivors and quite zombie killing machine herself too. Dolph finds daughter who takes him to other survivors. Movie moves from zombie killing to small group surviving zombie infection.

This might sound like good zombie movie. It is not. It looks like it but forgets what makes good zombie movies good. First of all zombies don't feel dangerous. Usually people die when they make mistakes. Dolph and his group makes all the mistakes in first ten minutes. Group members die but it feels more like script said they die than they did something wrong which killed them. After almost losing all of his group Dolph stays behind alone. Because it was on script. There was no sensible reason to stay as far as they knew whole city was turned into zombies.

Good zombie films study group dynamics in stressful situation. Battle of the Damned has group without any dynamics. Characters don't have any personality. Dolph is like robot who is programmed to save the daughter. Daughter doesn't like her father. Leader of survivors is leader. Two Asians had relationship. I almost forgot lovers of the daughter and the leader. They had even less personality than others Robots appeared at one point. Someone send robots to kill zombies in a city which was scheduled for firebombing. Don't ask my why,

Battle of the Damned looks good and has few nice visual tricks. It works better as action movie than zombie movie. Characters and story make it forgettable.