It seems director Paul W.S. Anderson has lost all of the momentum and respect he earned with films like Soldier and Event Horizon (along with the original Resident Evil). Long considered a thoughtful auteur in the world of science fiction, he can now easily be considered a resident hack with this phoned-in job on the third sequel of a video game-based movie series.
The entire Resident Evil shebang can be summed up in one word — zombies. A company called the Umbrella Corporation deals in genetic research but a broken vial unleashes an epidemic that kills millions except that they don’t really die. They become the ravenous undead. Haven’t we seen this done so many times before and so much better in 28 Days and Dawn of the Dead? Even George Romero’s uninspired sequels to his extended Night of the Living Dead saga are so much better than this. Anyone see or even hear about Diary of the Dead? Survival of the Dead? The entire genre is practically deceased.
The problem is that filmmakers like Anderson keep thinking that there’s ripe story material to be had, like squeezing blood from a stone. Here, we are treated to what should be nothing but 90 minutes of butt-kicking turned into a bookend action movie. It starts with about 10 minutes of reasonably good action, ends with about another 10 minutes but there is nothing in the middle but dead space, a void of story and exposition that leaves us with $60 million worth of dimly lit sets, atrocious acting and the thought we should either have left at the 11-minute mark or, having committed to stay till the truly bitter end, immediately march to Hollywood to demand a refund.
Resident Evil: Afterlife is an awful piece of filmmaking. It makes Piranha look like Casablanca. It’s as derivative as Piranha was regarding Jaws. This movie relied so heavily on The Matrix for its few interesting sequences that theatres really should have just shown The Matrix. In the opening few minutes, our heroine Alice (Milla Jovovich), now cloned for some reason, storms the underground Umbrella headquarters in an attempt to kill some guy with a horrible accent that clearly wasn’t his own. She attacked the front lobby of this building with a machine gun in each hand, avoiding the oncoming bullets by running along the walls, achieving unbelievable feats of gymnastics as she lands on her feet, still running and getting new bullets at the same time. The obvious wire fu only added to the ammunition against this dreck as we also get treated to several ‘bullet time’ freeze frame rotation sequences and even a burly brawl-lite since the lead character has cloned herself. Agent Smith? No, more like Agent Alice.
Anderson and star Jovovich must be taking up the gauntlet dropped by Michael Bay and Megan Fox with the Transformers movies. No one cares to add any thought to these spectacles of special effects and wafer thin stories. Some of the graphics were cool but who cares? My mind is blown away by images from graphic novels transferred to Silly Putty. Engaged minds need more than guns and explosions.
The only directorial effort was a lame attempt at setting mood by making the movie dark and having many of the characters raspy. It was embarrassing to even sit in the audience. It’s hard to imagine how poorly the whole creative team feels about unleashing this drivel onto the world. It reminded me of the Blade series. The first movie started with something good and golden but then tried to strike the same jackpot at the same well over and over again, always coming up dry. That reminds me: why are vampire and zombie movies still around? Haven’t filmmakers drained every ounce out of them yet? If this movie is any indication, the answer is definitely yes.
