Movie Notes: Resident Evil: Apocalypse
= 2 stars
Starring Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Oded Fehr
Directed by Alexander Witt
Synopsis
Alice (Milla Jovovich) teams up with Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) and other misfits to protect Raccoon City, overrun with zombies and monsters that infect the survivors.
The Good
- Hot babe Alice (Jovovich) is joined by also-hot babe Jill Valentine (Guillory). Jill resembles Lara Croft’s sister, decked out in a totally battle-inappropriate tube top and mini skirt. Milla performs ludicrous heroics like a back flip off a motorcycle with a machine gun in each hand, running down the side of a laughably tall building, and participating in a highly amusing “boss battle” fist fight against a huge, gross, zombie mutant. Yes, hot babes killing everything in sight does have some primal appeal.
- The ultimate solution is to nuke the whole city, following which there’s some entertaining genetic engineering stuff that sets up the next flick.
The Bad
- An extremely generic, zombie-action flick with a numbing, sedative quality created by constant gunfire, excessively gross baddies, and everything not tied down blowing up. Cuts fly as quickly as bullets, and everything is filmed from incomprehensible angles just because it looks cool.
- Basically incomprehensible plot — or at least, I don’t know what I would gain from comprehension.
Conclusion
As silly (if not sillier) than the previous Resident Evil flick. The first at least had a novel, antiseptic yet “WTF?” quality as everything took place in an underground cavern with a little bit of mystery. The only improvements provided by this second outing is the added eye candy of Sienna Guillory, and Milla getting to kick exponentially more ass. I suppose for some, that may suffice.
IMDB: Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Wikipedia: Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Rotten Tomatoes: Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Adding in Jill Valentine and the Tyrant was a fan-nod and pretty much made the movie for me (being a fan). I still don’t see any reason why the storylines of the first Resident Evil (which sorta was reflected in the first movie) and the second (only certain scenes were referenced in the second movie) couldn’t have been adapted faithfully for cinema. Especially the first because it had intrigue, betrayal, romance, thrills, huge monsters and wonderfully bad, but humorous, B movie quality voice acting!
Having not played the games, my interpretation of these resident evil
flicks is pretty different. As a preview, I just watched “extinction”
and dang, jill valentine wasn’t in it.
[…] few sorta cool self-referential sequences that reference the first and second installments. Essentially, Alice makes her way back to the Raccoon City underground in the quest to […]
The Resident Evil series are great.