Resident Evil: Apocalypse

As the immediate continuation of the story from the original RESIDENT EVIL, this film shows us the devastation unleashed upon Raccoon City, after a virus gets out and turns everyone into flesh-biting zombies. Alice, who now seems to have attained superhuman powers, teams up with some bad actors with guns and attempts to fight her way through the living dead and back into normalcy. A crappy movie ensues.

What do you get when you combine bad actors with cheesy dialogue, horrible directing, a throwaway story, extras “pretending” to be the living dead, the city of Toronto, lots of smoke machines, plenty of darkness and a sad-sack pack of characters who we’re supposed to give three shits about? You get this movie along with a zoo of its other issues, all of which combine to make it one of the most annoying, redundant and uninteresting movies of the year. I hope to God this isn’t a trend, but other than the fact that we, once again, see almost none of the “kills” in this movie (even though it’s rated R???), every single action scene is quick-cut to the point that I was just rolling my eyes, trying to catch up to everything that was being thrown at me. More than once did I lean over to my friend at the screening and say, “I can’t see anything, dude.” Not seeing anything that is happening in an action scene is not fun for me. This movie is not fun. It’s drudgery. I felt bored watching it. Bored with its lame-ass characters (who is this Jill Valentine anyway…I know nothing about her), bored with its insistence on using characters of different nationalities for some reason or another (there’s a German guy, a Russian guy, a British girl, etc…), but most of all, bored with its lame set-ups, unscary “boo” scares and tepid story, which combined a boring “search and rescue” operation with some sort of “zombie” attack and need to get out of the city. The film also over-uses flashbacks like they’re going out of style (how about sticking to the story at hand, man?), slow-motion and strobe effects like a kid in a candy store and a horrible look, that doesn’t even come close to the spit-shine sheen that the first one sported (even Paul Anderson haters have to admit that the man does make his films “look” spic-and-span…although he apparently can’t write for shit)

The only three things that semi-worked for me in this movie were the gorgeous Milla Jovovich, who is still looking sweet and offers yet another gratuitous tit shot, the new monster character named Nemesis, who looked cool most of the time, but also looked like a wrestler with a puppet-head at other times and the “money shot” of Jovo vertically running down that building at top speed. That was neat. Other than that, you get a bunch of scenes featuring no-name authority figures with guns, mowing slow-walking extras down, lots of kills, none of which are inspired, and characters walking around dead-end streets talking about shit that nobody cares about (the regeneration of the T-virus, blah-blah-blah) Oh, and did I mention the African-American “comic relief” character? Gimme a break. I actually liked the first RESIDENT EVIL, thought it moved fast, featured some wicked kills, fun characters, blood and guts and a couple of ultra-cool action sequences, but this one doesn’t have any of that, and includes about 4 different endings (and yes, unfortunately, they leave the door open for another installment) By the way, I know this is only a small point, but if you’re going to spend millions of dollars on a movie, why don’t you take a few bucks to block out the Canadian symbols on top of the buildings like the Bank of Montreal and the CIBC. At the very least, it will give us Canadians less of the impression that the entire film was shot in downtown Toronto, as opposed to some ugly, Hollywood backlot with lots of smoke machines. Lazy. Whatever the case, this movie has so many other bad elements going for it, that small bits like that only added to its overall sense of caca. All that said, it has been noted that I am not a “zombie” film lover by any means (neither 28 DAYS LATER or DAWN OF THE DEAD did anything for me), so maybe this sort of 100 mph rat-tat-tat will do it for you. Tits down for me.

(c) 2021 Berge Garabedian