Army of Thieves, a new film which launched on Netflix last weekend (UK) takes Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead universe further (earlier?) with a prequel directed by Matthias Schweighöfer that manages to inject humour in the vein of Taika Waititi. We laughed a lot.

You take 5 key characters each with their specific skill set; the brains, the brawn, the hacker, the getaway driver, and the safecracker, and you’ve got yourself a heist movie. Add a level of self-awareness in the script that calls out this typically scripted situation and we knew we had got a good Netflix family film on our hands. Apart from the swearing, and there’s quite a lot of it.

As seems to be the new normal for the Netflix films appealing to the international audience, there are sections of dialogue in French, German, Portuguese, along with the bulk of the film in English. This didn’t seem to jar with the general tone of the film but more played to the cliche of the international band of misfits.

The only downside to Army of Thieves appears to be the character of the head of the Interpol task force tracking down the criminal gang. It sounds odd that our accusation is that the character is unbelievable in a comedy movie including zombies, but somehow the Interpol chief doesn’t gel with the rest of the action, let alone the fact that he continuously swears in an unnecessary and gratuitous way.

It’s definitely not a classic family film, but for a rainy afternoon in with a teenage+ group then it’s a highly recommended way to spend a couple of hours chuckling away. The script, the direction, and the casting all pulls together brilliantly into a laugh a minute crime caper where you find yourselves rooting for the getaway and not the overacting Interpol officer.