Army of Thieves (2021)

Army of Thieves is a 2021 Netflix heist comedy and prequel to Army of the Dead, directed by and starring Matthias Schweighöfer. It follows a bank teller with a safecracking hobby who joins an international crew to open three legendary Wagner safes while the zombie outbreak occupies the news. The film wants to be a romantic caper first and a franchise artifact second. It succeeds just enough at the former to make the latter feel like paperwork.

The ensemble is international by design. Nathalie Emmanuel, Guz Khan, and Jonathan Cohen fill out the crew, though the camera remains fixed on a white German lead and the film never comments on its own casting. The two women in the crew are competent and central: Gwendoline runs the operation, Korina handles the hacking, and both eventually value the challenge over the cash. That is a mild progressive breeze, not a thesis. The crew robs safes belonging to a billionaire, and the script treats money as secondary to reputation, which is a familiar heist convention dressed in modest anti-wealth sentiment. No systemic critique follows.

Elsewhere the ledger is quiet. There are no LGBTQ characters or themes, no racial commentary, no climate messaging, no body-positive framing, and no revisionist history. Sebastian is an obsessive, socially awkward savant, a nerd archetype that could be read as neurodivergent-coded, but the film never names or develops that reading. The tone is breezy, romantic, and lightly comic; it wants to entertain, not instruct. The result is a professionally assembled caper with a few progressive reflexes and no sermon. It is the cinematic equivalent of a well-made hotel breakfast: competent, pleasant, and unlikely to radicalize anyone.