I am not normally a fan, at all of zombie/zombie apocalypse movies - I find the reverence with which Night of the Living Dead is held inexplicable (it just looks amateurish!), World War Z y a big yawn! The only zombie film I have genuinely enjoyed was Shaun of the Dead and am am pretty sure that that is because it is satire (and very well written to boot).
But this was a different experience! The lengthy pre-title sequence really showed us much if not all of the strengths of the film - great and involving narrative drive, a good helping of black humour and wonderfully ironic soundtracks making perfect use of the music associated with Vegas shows (and ,later on, Wagner and Gotterdammerung!) , the gorily explicit deaths and actions of typical Vegas inhabitants like Elvis impersonators and hookers and finally the comically absurd, very violent walling-off of zombie-infected Vegas which set up the scenario for the rest of the film - the heist. All this was a luridly thrilling start to the film and that sense of joyous involvement never left me, even though the running time is a remarkable two and a half hours. The film was much criticised for this but for me it worked - Snyder managed to balance almost perfectly the different elements - plot advance/zombie threats/character development/gory zombie attacks - never focusing too long on one at the expense of others.
The remainder of the film had all the necessary heist elements - the gathering of a motley crew, a mysterious extra person involved, family conflicts, particularly the central character and his until-then estranged daughter, the race against the clock and then, the final getaway. And that motely crew - yes there were cliched elements in who they were but there was enough originality and energy for this to be relatively unimportant. There were many fun details to be along the way, not least the magnificent zombie tiger (it used to be part of Siegfried and Roy’s act!)
Good fun then, was had by all.