Resident Evil: Afterlife

Another series I wanted to like, as I loved (most of) the video games of the same name. Every video game adaptation ends up rough, but some manage to be just bad enough to hit that "so bad it's good" threshold, and the first one managed it pretty well. The second one was acceptable but still a bit painful, and the third one reached a point of ridiculousness where I didn't even know what to think. If the third one didn't jump the shark then the fourth one certainly did.

The acting is bad and the movie takes itself too seriously to be enjoyable. Instead of merely being a Matrix rip-off with zombies and doing every over the top thing it can think of (which would have been fine, and welcomed by me), the movie spends too much time trying to have a coherent plot (which it fails miserably at). I will never understand how a director starts out to make a movie like this and actually believes that he can put thirty minutes of no action in the film and still be okay.

Wentworth Miller (Chris Redfield, and Michael Scofield in "Prison Break") tried desperately to save this film. He's (in my opinion) a great actor, and every time he's on screen you seem to be having a good time. The problem is that he's not the protagonist, and the film would probably have been far more watchable had he been.

I'd like to believe that I can enjoy a wide range of movies (Citizen Kane, Casablanca and The Godfather are tied for my favorite film of all time, The Last Station was my favorite movie of 2009 and I'm a giant fan of Die Hard and Predator), but my problem is with movies that suffer from an identity crisis. Either you're a bad action flick that substitutes style for substance or you're a film that tries to manage both and fails at both. This is the latter, and the actions scenes (good as they may be) are just too few and far in between to handle the lack of anything going on otherwise.

From the beginning the film starts off with an over done slow motion shot of a high fashioned Japanese girl who will clear the streets and eventually the globe with a vicious bite.

Alice quickly appears with an army of clones to invade the hive as expected, the army invasion reeked of exhausted clips from the Matrix. The expected falling to your death while firing rounds both up and down only to be save my an ejected cable at the perfect moment.

Of course the real Alice wouldn't infiltrate the base with her clones she goes after the king pin and fails only you be given the antidote to the T virus. The worse move in the film, the extreme actions scenes were cheapened by the results of Alice returning to a 'human' state. Though all of the Resident Evil films were over the top it was except able be cause Alice was not human. Everyone wants to be an over the top hero of a fictional world.

Resdent Evil is obviously not a film you watch for the plot, but the action which didn't improve anything. Over all the movie wasn't filled with enough up close infected gory shots, to many extreme action moves that left you rolling your eyes and no new monsters or a half naked Jovovich!

So what was the point. To make you sit though Resident Evil 2 for the 4th time only to find that the 5th is already in production. At least Milla Jovovich is set for life.