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Resident Evil: Apocalypse
They're back from the dead...again.

Starring: Milla Jovovich , Sienna Guillory, Mike Epps, Oded Fehr, Jared Harris
Director: Alexander Witt
Screenwriters: Paul W.S. Anderson

Reviewed by Larry Stanley

Resident Evil was to me at least, a half way decent film with lots of action, zombies and a little bit of  a spooky story. Resident Evil: Apocalypse is more of the same, but with some of the worst direction I have seen in a long time.

"I am sooo firing my agent."

Milla Jovovich returns as Alice, the valiant semi super hero who once worked for the Umbrella Corporation, a multinational company with it's own private army, air force and secret police that actually takes the word "Fascist" to a new level.

After the accident in the super-secretive hive complex hidden beneath Raccoon City, Alice and the only other survivor of the disaster are carted off to the Umbrella labs where they undergo some very radical plastic surgery.

This leaves Alice as a sort of super soldier, faster, stronger, deadlier and able to run down the side of a building. More on that later.

The film is insulting in many ways, mostly with the way the camera jerks around all the time, and the constant insertion of the so called CCTV scans of the various parts of Raccoon City.

The Zombies look pretty good. They are slow, sluggish and look well done except when you see them close up, as in the Police Station or the scene where Valentine (Sienna Guillory) is stealing a car. Then they tend to look like people in make-up who were told to act angry, evil and hungry.

The situation is simple. The 'T-Virus', originally designed to help heal people, has actually been turned into a Bio Weapon by the Umbrella Corp. Sending a team back to the Hive releases the infected and hungry Zombies onto the population of Raccoon City.
While this has started happening, Umbrella has sent their private police around the city to rescue top level scientists and family members and get them to safety.

One of the agents is sent to fetch the daughter of a scientist who is still in school. And let me tell you right now. If you are ever in class and some beefy security guy who looks like shooting up a room full of kids is not something he would mind, takes a kid out of your class room and the kid is the child of a high level Corporation Executive or an Elected Government Official…. Haul A$$ out of there, get home load the car and split because something ain't right.

Sophie Vavasseur as Angie Ashford is a spooky little kid. Now, she is cute and talented for a 12 year old. But you put her in a Zombie film with just the right type of lighting and she can worry you a little.

Alice and a few other people while trying to escape the cordoned off city are forced into a deal with Angie's father, Dr. Ashford to rescue Angie. They travel across town, each from different areas of the city and fight a horde of hungry undead to get to her.
But, they don't know that Angie has her own secrets.

Filled with the best bullet time effects I have seen (and I have gotten tired of Bullet Time) in a few months, and some pretty good one liners, RE:A is not a great film but for us Zombie freaks it will do until Shaun of the Dead in a few weeks.

Now, the good and the bad. First Milla Jovovich. Yes, boys (and a few girls) she is naked in the film. In fact, there is a lot of nudity in the movie, so that should garner it a few extra thousand at the box office. There is a good deal of blood, explosions and gunfire. There are body parts galore, and some pretty good pyro effects. But that ain't enough to make a good film.

RE:A tries to take aspects of the action genre and combine them with the horror field. Where that works for the most part in RE one, here it never seems to quite gel. Jovovich is great, as usual. She comes across as the perfect female action hero, beautiful, sexy, deadly and not afraid to show a little flesh; but she never uses her sexuality or gender to make the role look easy or to get away with something in the film.

She does not play it coy at any time. She is what Lara Croft would be, if Lara Croft was an action hero and not video game.

Which is what Alice comes across as; someone who you can believe in and hope she could exist. Someone you would depend on to do what she says she will do and to do it to the best of her ability without trying to play the 'weeping female' (like "the Bride" kept doing).
She is also someone you can feel sorry for, and have some emotional attachment to. She is, in some ways, a female Robo-Cop. A victim of corporate evil, who only wants to do what is right, and what she can.

Milla Jovovich was quite good in the film. Her co-stars were alright, albeit written quite stupidly. Sienna Guillory as Raccoon City Police Office Jill Valentine does some of the dumbest stuff you can see. You know someone is going to turn into a Zombie when they die, so you just ignore it and don't finish the body? No way, Jose. Friend or not, I would have put one into them just to be safe.

Zack Ward as Nicholai Sokolov stood out as the military guy with the sense of humor. He and his partner in the film Yuri Loginova (Stefan Hayes) offered the only real shock in the film.

The appearance of Mike Epps as the small time criminal L.J. gave the film the needed comic boost. But, even here the film delved into some serious racial profiling. I am surprised that the NAACP does not say something about it.

Here is a tip. You are alone at night in a city that has been overrun by hordes of undead Zombies, killing and butchering people right and left. You are in a car, driving through streets that are littered with rubble, wrecked cars and dead bodies.

DON'T STARE AT THE HALF NAKED HOOKERS. If they are just standing around, there is probably something wrong. That is no time to be window shopping.

SPOILER WARNING

A few other things. Near the start of the film, Loginova and Sokolov are trying to rescue a woman from the Zombies. She is fighting them like crazy and gets trapped on top of a building.

She has been bitten and she knows what is going to happen. So, she jumps off the building. Why? Why waste all that time? You know what is going to happen to you, you are going to kill yourself. So, why not just go on and jump when you saw you were at the edge? Why waste time fighting?

Next, everyone in the Umbrella Corp has a location device on them. Angie included. So, why didn't they just use the device to find her in the first place, pull her out and save a lot of trouble?

Finally, the infamous wall running down scene. Won't work; gravity would have pulled her down faster then her legs could move her. What they should have done was allow Alice to rappel down the side of the building. Might not look as dramatic, but would have made more sense.
 
All in all, RE:A is not a great film. But it is fun, and a good way to kill an hour and a half. But, be warned, this is not the end. They set the film up in a way to not only demand a third film but to start one.

Rating:

(2 out of 4 stars)

Larry Stanley is the editor and publisher of Penguin Comics and Movies, located at http://www.penguincomics.net and has done over 500 movie reviews in his career. He is also a contributing reviewer to Cultcuts magazine (http://www.cultcuts.net) and Columbia360 (http://www.columbia360.com/) as well the magazine Devine Exploitation.

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