Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Back in 2004, I used to write movie reviews for the USM student newspaper, the "Student Printz". Because I occasionally feel lazy, and it seems a shame that all of five people ever read these, I've decided to repost them here, in the original versions that I emailed to my editor, Noel, all those years ago.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse is one of those movies you wish somebody would just shoot in the head so it would quit staggering around trying to eat your brains. Resident Evil: Apocalypse is like taking everything that is bad about a Paul W.S. Anderson movie and distilling all the good stuff away, oh wait…it isn’t like that, it is that.

Resident Evil opens just days after the first film finished, with our heroine, Alice (Milla Jovovich) waking up after her first encounter with the evil T-virus and its creator, the Umbrella Corporation. The Umbrella Corporation has been secretly developing this virus, which brings dead people back to life in a secret underground facility called the Hive. After zombies in the first film overran the Hive, the Umbrella Corporation has decided to reopen the facility, allowing all the undead creatures inside to spill out into the streets of Raccoon City, where an entire population of people are waiting to become zombie food. The Umbrella Corporation decide it would just be easier to vaporize the entire city, so they seal off the entire city (which thankfully has only one entrance) and the only people left alive are a small band of police officers and civilians led by Alice. They are contacted by an Umbrella scientist who offers them a way out but only if they rescue his daughter who is also trapped in the city.

Director Alexander Witt is working off a script by the director of the first movie, Paul W.S. Anderson. In fact, he’s practically stolen Anderson’s entire playbook, yet seems to have only a minimal grasp of the source material and script. He uses Anderson’s trademark computerized maps to cut between scenes and works the entire movie like its just one big computer game, with characters bumbling about from location to location with no rhyme or reason and the bosses getting progressively harder as the story progresses. Additionally, the lickers, who were only briefly featured in the first film get only about an extra minute of screen time in this movie, which allows them to introduce: the Nemesis. Another product of the T-virus research, the Nemesis moves like Darth Vader, looks like something Todd McFarlane doodled in his spare time, and wears a black leather slicker out fit that looks like it was stolen from the set of I Know What You Did Last Summer. Oh, and he’s bulletproof too, which is a brilliant design innovation.

While most zombie movies usually revolve around themes of commercialism or societies that are losing individuality, Resident Evil: Apocalypse decides instead to focus on giant, evil corporations who own everything (Who released the original “Resident Evil” game? Oh, wait that’s right: Sony.) The only thing that saves this movie is Mike Epps, who has all the great lines and Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) wearing an outfit that that is definitely not standard police issue.

To put it simply: if you must go see only one zombie movie this year, wait for Shaun of the Dead. As for Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the movie barely manages to pull enough entertainment to keep the masses from breaking into the theatre to eat the projectionist alive for making them sit through it.