Damn thing won’t stay dead.
10 minutes into this dross I was thinking one thing: Someone should sue.
Whether that someone is The Matrix, Blade 2, Die Hard, Silent Hill, Underworld, or simply me and anyone in the audience aged over 16 is the question I guess.
After all, in the first 10 minutes there were no less than 7 super slo-mo shots of people either getting shot, performing ridiculous and unnecessary acrobatics or simply walking around looking (allegedly) cool. The film’s running time is a scant 90 odd minutes, it would be half that if run at normal speed.
Scene after scene in bullet-time set to god-awful hard rock music.
Milla Jovovich is Alice, the survivor of an increasingly crappy series of shitty movies. As is always the case with sequels they try to refresh the audience with a brief recap of the events from previous films. Let me shortcut that for you here.
Resident Evil was better than I expected but still no more than OK.
I hated the second film with all the passion I could muster, it was an 80 minute blight on cinema.
The third film had one good scene and if I was feeling friendly I might say it was slightly better than horrible.
The first scene takes us to a hive in Japan run by a tosser who obviously has a second job as a Matrix Agent, he evens wears his sunnies inside. There is some form of fight involving the aforementioned slo-mo and pointless leaping as the army of Alice’s shown at the conclusion of the 3rd film are unleashed. Then for whatever reason all the seemingly indestructible Alice’s disappear and we are once again left with one.
“Welcome… Neo… to the Matrix… rip-off…”
The Tosser’s name is Wesker, at one point he has two grenades land at his feet, they leave a few marks. Later he is in a plane crash – no biggie.
I was already frustrated by this point… little did I know I’d already seen the best bits of the film.
It turns out that Alice is now human again and in search of safety at a place called Arcadia, where survivors broadcast messages and invites to survivors. She finds what she thinks is Arcadia and runs into Claire Redfield (Ali Larter) who has gone mad and lost her memory, denial seems a fair response to realising that she is in such a laughable film.
For some reason I can’t recall they decide they must head to L.A., now a burned out shell of a city, with only 4 survivors, who are fortunate enough to be spotted by the crop-duster sized plane that they are piloting.
The now 6 survivors plot their escape to Arcadia while the zombie natives grow restless – and bigger – in the desolate streets below. Which reminds me, Resident Evil is all about the zombies. There is one scene involving any form of undead action in this entire film, it runs about 40 seconds in length and is the best scene, and only interaction with zombies in the film. What the hell was Paul Anderson thinking?
So the snooze button is now firmly pressed in, there’s another 30 odd minutes of talk and inaction before the (alleged) climax where we return to slo-mo for the bewildering last 10 minutes of running time. Then the movie ends on a cliffhanger that begs for yet another sequel.
I too am begging, begging that they put an end to this nonsense. For some reason a few years ago I had a momentary dalliance with Vanilla Coke, I inexplicably found it tasty for a week or two before realising that after the first sweet sip every subsequent taste is actually pretty terrible. Every year or so I stupidly buy another bottle, have a sip and again get sucked in, before the second sip brings me back to cold hard reality.
That is this entire franchise in a nutshell. The first sip was sweet (without being mindblowing) and the memory of that keeps me heading back every couple of years to be disappointed.
As Alice herself says at one point when yet another ludicrous plot event comes up “Why am I not surprised”.
Resident Evil: Afterlife absolutely sucks. None of us should be surprised. There are times when the audience must take some responsibility for themselves: if we stop paying hard earned money to support such shit, maybe they’ll stop churning it out…
Until then I look forward to my next taste of Vanilla Coke.
Final Rating – 4 / 10. In video games the plots are generally lazy and serve only to present the action, both the plot and the action of even the worst video games are a substantial upgrade to what is on show here.
