Originally published 9/13/04
Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Director: Alexander Witt
Writer: Paul W.S. Anderson, based upon the videogame by Capcom
Producers: Jeremy Bolt, Paul W.S. Anderson, Don Carmody
Stars: Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Oded Fehr, Thomas Kretschmann, Jared Harris, Sandrine Holt, Mike Epps, Sophie Vavasseur, Raz Adoti
I am asked to accept one of two remarkable possibilities. One: that the evil global conglomerate Umbrella Corporation managed, in a feat of hustle engineering that would have impressed the folks behind the Berlin Wall, to erect, in a matter of hours, massive high-tech barricades blocking every escape point from Raccoon City, which is a spitting image in both size and shape to Toronto.
The other possibility is that they had these barricades up already, and it must have been some story they spun for why they might someday be necessary. And I’m starting to wonder in what country this is all taking place. We worry in America about corporations being too powerful, too friendly with the government, more in control than we know. But I have my doubts that we’ve reached the point where a corporation could wall in an entire populace and start slaughtering them without hearing even a peep from the authorities.
Either way, Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a by-God disaster in the storytelling arena, and for perhaps the first time in movie history, a movie based on a video game proves clumsier and dumber in both pacing and plot detail than the actual video game.
In the first Resident Evil movie, a bio-weapon known as the “T-Virus” was released in Umbrella’s underground laboratory “The Hive”. The T-Virus re-animates corpses and makes them zombies, then they bite other people and turn them into zombies. The movie skipped showing us the horror of the lab’s population succumbing to this, because frankly it didn’t care about them, only about creating a mob of monsters for super-bad-ass heroes to fight against. By “super-bad-ass”, I mean model-featured 20-somethings who have Matrix-level fighting skills and equate cracking sassy bad jokes in nightmare situations with bravery. They only exist in geek-baiting trash like this, since the purpose of their shapely legs and numb-skulled catch phrases is to draw attention away from the plot.
Now Umbrella is re-opening “The Hive” to find out what happened. We thought they knew what happened, or at least knew enough to send more than six non-super-bad-ass guys in haz-mat suits with flashlights. But oh well, the zombie plague escapes, and soon spreads throughout all of Raccoon City.
Only we don’t get to see that, either. This sequel is written by Paul W.S. Anderson (Mortal Kombat, Soldier), who wrote and directed the first and also handled double duty on this summer’s Alien vs. Predator, and if there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that to him ordinary people by the millions are worth snuffing if it provides slimy monsters to pit against his super-bad-ass heroes.
So we skip the entire disintegration of the town and cut to half a day later, when Alice (Milla Jovovich), survivor of the previous movie, wakes up in an empty hospital strapped to machines. Umbrella has genetically altered her, somehow, using her body to carry on their T-Virus experiments, and she’s become even more of a super-bad-ass as a result.
She’s also, somehow, precognitive, as we learn when she enters an action scene by driving a motorcycle through a stained glass window. It’s the only way she could have known that someone needed her help in there, unless she walked up to the window, peeked in to see what was happening, then positioned a ramp and backed up her motorcycle 100 feet to pick up speed.
This is a movie that thinks Alice breaking a sniper’s neck on a high-rise roof, then running down the side of the building in some sort of rappelling harness to beat up guys on the ground, is cool. And it’s kind of cool, but not cool enough to stop me from asking how, within the time frame, she got up on the roof to begin with, or why she considered it necessary.
Ugh, I could fill the whole review with this.
Alice eventually joins forces with Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), a fresh-faced, jovially super-bad-ass cop who’s clearly watched a lot of bad zombie movies, since she’s the only one who knows a) you have to shoot them in the head, and b) you have to wear a ludicrously improbable outfit while doing it (a strapless halter and mini-skirt, standard cop gear). Seeing Alice in action, she sassily opines “I’m good, but I’m not that good.” As if this sort of thing is always happening in Raccoon City – maybe it is?
They, along with sidekicks who represent a wide array of ethnic groups and nationalities, but most of whom die pointless and gruesome deaths (usually right at the moment you thought they were about to become significant), are contacted by eccentric scientist and worried father Dr. Ashford (Jared Harris). He offers them safe passage outside the barricade if they can track down and rescue his moppet daughter (Sophie Vavasseur).
And so they lurch from one idiotic battle to another. At one point they stop to have a take-stock conversation in a location Alice, in her super-bad-ass way, assures us is safe – “If there’s more of them, we would have seen them by now!” They are standing in a graveyard.
Meanwhile, the Umbrella folk have decided that they are better off nuking the whole town lest people find out they’ve been up to no good; but, since there’s a few hours until the nukes arrive, why not use the doomed populace to try out some of their other inventions?
This movie, so steadfastly mediocre in photography, effects, action, music, and utterly lackadaisical by any dramatic standard, is infected with a new strain of Hollywood virus. Gripped by fever, filmmakers begin to fear that if even three minutes go by without bloodletting and rawkin’ guitars on the soundtrack, the teen audience will get fatally bored and not buy the DVD. It makes a Friday the 13th entry look as languid as Days of Heaven.
But they forget that some of the best parts of the game they’re cribbing from (which, itself, was best when it cribbed from George Romero, who knows how to make good zombie movies), were quiet, atmospheric; when your character walked down a hallway, hearing nothing but a loud ticking clock, seeing a trail of blood along the floor, and not knowing what was waiting around the corner.
Hitchcock said that a bomb going off is surprise, but showing an audience a bomb hidden under a chair is suspense. Resident Evil: Apocalypse is all surprise, surprise that is not even surprising most of the time, and no suspense. And frankly, I almost feel dirty even invoking Hitchcock’s name here, as it reminds me that his masterworks and multiplex ballast like this could actually be part of the same medium.