[This review has spoilers.]
I’m not a huge Resident Evil fan. I honestly haven’t played through any of the games. I enjoyed Paul W.S. Anderson’s first movie, and even found Resident Evil: Apocalypse somewhat enjoyable. I have no emotional investment in Capcom’s survival horror franchise at all. That said, Resident Evil: Afterlife is the most offensive movie I’ve seen this year. Oh, it’s bad.
It’s Wing Commander movie bad.
It’s Double Dragon movie bad.
It’s Uwe Boll bad.
Resident Evil: Extinction sucked, and I went into Resident Evil: Afterlife with no expectations whatsoever. Despite my apathy and cynicism, RE:A still managed to shock and disappoint me. The film is part Paul W.S. Anderson’s love letter to Milla Jovovich, part half-assed horror movie, part parody action film, and only a very tiny bit Resident Evil.
Resident Evil: Extinction started with the world completely overrun by zombies and ended with super-powered psychic action hero Alice discovering dozens of clones for herself. Those dozens of clones amounted to a bizarre, overwrought, shamelessly Matrix-ripoff 20-minute opening action sequence before they all die and make the entire third movie pointless. If not for the cartoonish, ultraviolent assault on the Umbrella Corporation’s Japan headquarters at the beginning of the movie, the entire series could have simply skipped Extinction. Worse yet, that assault does absolutely nothing for the plot besides introduce villainous douchebag Wesker; we don’t get any clearer picture of Umbrella, we don’t get to know Alice or Wesker better as characters, and we don’t see any plot threads started with the exception of a wholly unnecessary Chekhov’s bomb. What should have been an epic and momentous climax to the film served only to pad out about 20 minutes of ludicrous violence before sweeping everything away and starting again.
After the opening orgy of violence, the film begins with a “six months later.” Alice is trying to find survivors, and eventually finds herself in a cheap facsimile of The Walking Dead, joining “Claire” and “Chris Redfield” (in name only), Tig from Sons of Anarchy, and a handful of other going-to-dies in a prison that’s been turned into a fortress to protect against the zombies. Incidentally, the shambling dead clamoring to get in look far more fake than the zombies in the first Resident Evil movie 8 years ago. They look less like an undead horde and more like a Thriller flash mob.
During the opening scene, I was worried that the entire movie would be nothing but Milla Jovovich interacting with herself in between acts of murder for two hours. Instead, she gets to deal with a half dozen of the blandest people to ever survive a zombie apocalypse. Every other character is boring. The gruff leader? Boring. The wormy creep? Boring. The pretty girl? Boring. As for “Claire” (introduced in the third movie) and “Chris” (who coincidentally just happened to be locked up for no reason in the prison they ran across), they’re a painfully obvious attempt by the producers to get the gaming audience to believe that this film series has anything to do with Resident Evil. Claire and Chris in this movie are as close to the games’ Redfields as Halle Barry’s character in Catwoman was to the comic book character.
At several points, the action becomes completely stupid. Over the last decade, I’ve developed a great tolerance for action sequences that rip off different bits from the Matrix, but even I wasn’t prepared at the bullshit this movie threw at me. At one point, Alice tries to land a small plane on the roof of a building. It almost overshoots and starts teetering over the edge. How does she survive? Another character jumps on the tail to pull the plane back. In another scene, she plants an explosive on that same roof, then uses a cable connected to a pipe on that roof to swing to safety. The pipe was a good six inches from the explosive, so of course she pulled off that stunt with a huge Spider-man swing instead of falling to her death. These are holes in logic and continuity that any 8-year-old would see as cartoony bullshit. Add to that over a dozen slow-motion “stuff is flying at your face” sequences clearly filmed only to milk the movie’s 3D, and you have action that would only satisfy a viewer after a frontal lobotomy.
The music can only be described as schizophrenic. It switches, seemingly at random, between a dull thrumming of drums and a loud cacophany of generic action movie techno. Between the bizarre music cues and the extensive use of slow motion in action sequences, I’m still not entirely convinced that Resident Evil: Afterlife isn’t a parody film.
Even the movie itself doesn’t know what it wants to be. The music flicks back and forth, the tone and direction toggles randomly between jump-scare horror and ridiculously choreographed action. One moment zombies get slaughtered by the scores, the next moment every character is creeping along, trying to avoid a sudden and violent death. There’s no real consistency, and when you watch three throw-away characters randomly die and Alice effortlessly kill a legion of zombies in the space of 15 minutes you know the movie has no idea what it’s doing. While it constantly switches between the horror and action genres, it never manages to feel like a video game movie, and with the exception of Umbrella’s logo and Wesker’s sunglasses-inside douchiness, doesn’t feel anything like Resident Evil.
Resident Evil: Afterlife is a confused, lazy mess. It’s worse than Superman 4. It’s worse than Die Hard 4. It’s worse than Indiana Jones 4. It may very well be the nadir of all movie fourth chapters. Paul W.S. Anderson went from a competent, reasonably entertaining director in films like Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon, and the original Resident Evil, to just half a notch above Uwe Boll in this cinematic abomination.
