Am I the only Zack Snyder fan who didn’t care for Army of the Dead? The zombie/heist genre hybrid could have been nippy and fun, yet it clocked in at a bum-numbing 148 minutes – a bloated beast of a movie where the plot (about a bunch of mercenaries blasting their way through a zombie-filled Las Vegas to rescue $200 million from a casino vault) was stretched to breaking point and the action ramped up at the expense of anything like wit or satire.

Snyder had done zombies before and done them well. His remake of George A. Romero’s seminal Dawn of the Dead was a pleasant surprise, playing as both a tribute to the zombie master and a thrilling update of his themes and tropes. But Army of the Dead bored me to death with its relentless bloodshed and ceaseless gunfire, and the actors (especially Dave Bautista as mission leader Scott Ward) were so wooden it was hard to tell the living from the undead – with one exception.

As skilled safecracker Ludwig Dieter, drafted in by Ward to break into the bank’s beautifully complex Götterdämmerung safe, Matthias Schweighöfer was the film’s one bright spot: an enthusiastic, engaging character who enlivened every scene he was in.

Schweighöfer is back for the prequel Army of Thieves, which I expected to loathe simply on the basis of its turgid predecessor. Or should that be successor? Snyder’s new self-created franchise gave us its second chapter before the first, while Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas is a forthcoming animated spin-off that promises to fill in the backstories of some of the other characters as well as explaining what caused the zombie outbreak in the first place. There’s also, if Snyder gets his way, likely to be an Army of the Dead 2.

But back to Army of Thieves. The prequel I didn’t think I wanted turns out to be a movie I thoroughly enjoyed and an expectations-defier that isn’t another zombie flick but rather a heist drama/action comedy/romance mash-up that’s as lively as Army of the Dead was ultimately dull.

Flashing back six years and set in Europe, when the zombie apocalypse was simply something rumbling across the Atlantic, the film focuses on Dieter’s journey from unassuming bank clerk to the most genial of lawbreakers. You root for him all the way as he’s recruited by career criminal Gwendoline (a no-nonsense Nathalie Emmanuel) to globe-trot around Europe and crack safes – specifically the “Ring Cycle” safes designed by locksmith Hans Wagner, in tribute to his composer namesake Richard Wagner (and en route to the Götterdämmerung in Army of the Dead, the final safe in the sequence).

Also in the gang are bad boy Brad (a rugged Stuart Martin), logistics expert Korina (an ass-kicking Ruby O. Fee) and getaway driver Rolph (a cheekily funny Guz Khan making his Hollywood debut), and they’re as vividly drawn as the characters in Army of the Dead were sketchy.

That probably has a lot to do with the fact Schweighöfer isn’t just the leading man (and a thoroughly loveable one at that); this time around, for this film, he’s also the director. Having helmed movies in his native Germany, he’s clearly a director who loves actors and he keeps them as the focus of a film that is epic in scale but intimate in feel.