hen last we left Raccoon City, Alice (Jovovich) had awakened in a mysteriously empty hospital and found herself in an urban nightmare.
Back up a few hours, and we see that the T virus outbreak from Umbrella Corp.'s supersecret underground laboratory, the Hive, has emerged above ground, and the zombies are on the move. Jill Valentine (Guillory), a disgraced cop and star member of S.T.A.R.S. (Special Tactics and Rescue Services), appears to know what's going on: She shoots them in the head and advises her fellow officers to leave the city while they still can.
As the city descends into chaos, Umbrella commando Carlos Olivera and his team are on their way to help restore order at the gates of Raccoon City. But when the virus reaches the Ravens Gate Bridge, Maj. Cain (Thomas Kretschmann) orders the city sealed. Olivera and the others are on their own.
Alice finds weapons and a really cute top and jeans in an abandoned surplus store. Meanwhile, Valentine, weather girl Terri Morales (Sandrine Holt) and a few other survivors seek refuge in a church, only to be set upon by the horrible Lickers.
Alice smashes through a stained-glass window on a cool motorcycle and dispatches the Lickers single-handedly. Seems she's been somehow enhanced by Umbrella during her convalescence.
Outside the city, Dr. Ashford (Jared Harris) makes contact with both Alice and Olivera. He makes them each the same proposal: Find his lost daughter, Angie (Sophie Vavasseur), and he'll tell them how they can escape the city. They have until sunrise, when Umbrella plans to nuke the city to eliminate the T virus infestation once and for all.
Been there, shot that
When the first Resident Evil opened two years ago, based on the hit Capcom video-game series, it was the first in a wave of movies to resurrect the all-but-gone zombie genre from the dead. Since then, a clutch of eager new filmmakers has breathed new life into the genre, culminating in such dazzling post-modern zombie movies as Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later and the upcoming satiric Shaun of the Dead.
So it seems strange that Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the return trip to the infected Raccoon City, feels so old-school. But it does, as if the hyped-up running dead of 28 Days Later had long overtaken and outstripped their lumbering counterparts from the first movie. Time has passed Resident Evil by, while it simply retreads old ground, like a corpse circling its own grave.
Anderson, who directed the first movie, comes back with a script that takes off on that film's sly cliffhanger ending, but hands the megaphone over to Witt, a cinematographer and second-unit director who makes his feature-film helming debut. The script falls prey to sequelitis: more and bigger action, more characters and less story. All the while Apocalypse tries to recapture whatever meager pleasures the first installment offered—Lickers, zombie dogs, blah blah blah. The result is surprisingly boring: Been there, shot that.
Guillory's Valentine, a character drawn from the game series, has almost nothing to do, and the redoubtable Fehr, as a corporate S.W.A.T. commando with a heart, has even less. Jovovich's Alice shows a bit more spunk (and a lot more skin), but basically functions as a female Terminator.
Witt tries to infuse the tired story with some visual style, but he's not able to overcome the sequel's stupefying banality. And Witt seems to have acquired the annoying habit of current action directors to shoot fight scenes with such jerky camera movements and quick edits that it's impossible to track the choreography.
