Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Reviewed on December 17th, 2009 By James (administrator) & filed in the Movie Reviews vault "This is my... BOOMSTICK!"

A funny thing happened when the first Resident Evil film was released. It made money! Returning $102 million from its healthy budget of $33 million. But this has happened before and sometimes word of mouth doesn’t put people off, resulting in many throwing good money away watching trash.

I liked the first film rather more than I was expecting to. And apparently so did everyone else as the sequel brought in noticeably more money for a comparatively small budget hike. But here is my problem: this film largely sucked so why did even more people then come back to watch the 3rd installment? Admittedly it was back on form but normally a turkey in the franchise kills any episodes that come after.

So I think its safe to assume that the fan base for the franchise is pretty bulletproof and it certainly doesn’t hinder things that Milla Jovovich successfully pulls off feisty and attractive. In all fairness to her she isn’t the world’s greatest actress but she is far from its worst. I don’t really know why she gets such unfair press, especially when we have seen actresses of dubious talent walking away with the industry’s highest accolades. In this kind of role she delivers the goods and handles the physicality of the role with total commitment.

This installment had the thinnest of storylines. The Hive gets re-opened and the undead flood out and before you know it the whole of Raccoon city is infected. Our heroine, Alice, gets plunged back into the meleé in a flimsy tale based around rescuing a top scientist’s daughter in exchange for passage out of the city. Along the way we encounter Jill Valentine in what is blatantly little more than an excuse to give fanboys an even bigger wet dream and together the pair of them kick various kinds of mutated ass.

Thankfully she doesn’t upstage our focal character and with a little ragtag band of survivors the next 60 minutes basically consists of running, shooting, screaming and kicking. Especially now that Alice has been genetically modified by the Umbrella Corporation.

Umbrella decides that it won’t hurt to throw a bit more shit at the fan and release Nemesis, another genetically modified individual (with a pleasing twist to his backstory) of Hulk-like proportions and the owner of a face worse than Jake Busey’s. His sole aim is to eliminate any tattle-tale survivors and thus protect Umbrella’s interests.

This could so easily be another ho-hum mindless action flick and for the most part it is. I still like our lead and warmed to her further but the nails in the coffin were hammered home every time Nemesis appeared on screen. As creatures in latex costumes and silicon prosthetics go, Nemesis has to rank as one of the worst. Surely someone must have looked at the final thing when it was delivered by the effects house and thought “that’s a bit shit!”? Its a shame that such a bad example of the art made it onto screen. It is so monumentally bad that it immediately disassociates the viewer from their immersion in the film and blots out any memory of the precious few good scenes that went beforehand.

I would say if you liked the first one then please go ahead and watch this one. It has a bearing on the whole story arc spanning the three films and without it you wont get the full experience. But it really isn’t very good. You may get something from the film (including Miss Jovovich’s obligatory nude scene) and there are worse ways to spend a miserable Winter’s evening.

But the bright side to this is that it will make you enjoy the 3rd film that much more! So chalk this one up as a hasty and ill-advised opportunity to make money from a franchise that was never expected to do so well at the box office. 5 out of 10.

Director: Alexander Witt
Screenplay: Paul W.S. Anderson
Released: 2004
Rating: 15
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Oded Fehr, Sienna Guillory, Thomas Kretschmann, Sophie Vassaveur, Jared Harris, Mike Epps, Iain Glen

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 10)

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One Response to “Resident Evil: Apocalypse”

1. rippedfromthecrypt.com review » Resident Evil: Extinction

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