ollowing the events of Resident Evil, the first in this series of films based on the popular shoot-'em-up videogame, tough-talking Alice (Jovovich) is still the prisoner of the evil Umbrella Corporation responsible for the zombie carnage. She wakes and escapes just in time to deal with a new viral outbreak that infects the unlucky citizens of the ridiculously named Raccoon City. She is the nominal heroine, though she rarely changes facial expressions and the closest she ever comes to having a personality is the statement "I don't feel human anymore."
Raccoon City, which has been laid out by idiots, seems to be about the size of Toronto and seems to be accessible by only one bridge, which leaves you to wonder whether the local TV stations spend much money on rush-hour traffic reports. The odd city planning gives the Umbrella Corporation the opportunity to seal off the entire metropolis with a single (albeit massive) roadblock, driving the frantic citizens back with machine-gun fire.
Carlos Olivera (Fehr) is a tough-talking cop who, flying over the city in a helicopter, spies a blonde fleeing zombies on a rooftop. His attempt at saving her amounts to bungee-jumping upside down while firing multiple rounds from the guns in each hand in the few seconds before the cord draws taut. He gets the zombies, but the girl still dies.
Angie Ashford (Sophie Vavasseur) is a tough-talking TV news personality who sees the citywide crisis as her ticket to an Emmy award. She doesn't add much beyond the occasional scream and a hamhanded just-desserts scene where she inadvertently captures her own sorry end on film.
Jill Valentine (Guillory) is a tough-talking supermodel cop whose idea of appropriate dress for a citywide outbreak of undead cannibalism is a tight skirt, bare-shoulders top and high heels. She shows how tough she is by marching into the police precinct to shoot zombies who have been mistaken for everyday average perpetrators. There she frees L.J. (Epps), a tough-talking black prisoner who says "motherf---er" a lot, before trying to flee the city with her partner, Peyton (Razaaq Adoti), a tough-talking black cop who says "bulls--t" a lot. Neither of these latter two characters shows much personality beyond their respective choices of epithet. One is cannon fodder destined to die early on, the other is a comic-relief character who isn't given anything humorous to do. Any racial component to these characterizations is left up to audience imagination.
Under attack in a church, Ashford, Valentine and Peyton find themselves surrounded and running out of ammunition. Alice smashes through the stained-glass window on a motorcycle, to a perfect landing in the center aisle, where she proceeds to blow the rotters back to hell. Cool enough, we suppose. But since she never met these people before, and her super powers do not include X-ray vision, how did she know there were people inside the church who needed her help? How did she know how to smash through the stained-glass window without landing on any of them? No explanation is ever offered. Only an audience raised from the dead without higher brain functions would fail to ask for one.
More than a little undead itself
Bad reviews often claim that the movies under evisceration have "no story." The phrase has become such a cliche that it no longer has any meaning; any review making that charge has to specify just what it entails. So very well. Just what are we saying when we claim that Resident Evil: Apocalypse has no story?
We're saying that it takes the zombie genre pioneered by George Romero, Dan O'Bannon, Peter Jackson and others, including the creators of the titular video game, assumes that the audience already knows all that stuff and doesn't bother to provide anything beyond a series of explosions and quick-cut action scenes so flensed of mood or impact that even devotees of action scenes for their own sake might find it fails their give-a-damn test. There's no context, no buildup, no gathering dread, no tension, no charm, no internal consistency, no sense of danger, no regret when characters die, no frisson when bad guys act like bad guys, no nothing. Even the beautiful ladies, Guillory and Jovovich, add little: They're sexy, and vivid enough as video-game heroines (insofar as that goal is consistent with their persuasiveness as characters, which is to say, not much), but their performances, as hampered by the script, are wafer-thin. Nothing in the story provides any emotional grip on who they're supposed to be. The characters don't relate to each other except in short declarative sentences of under 10 words, less
dialogue than place-holding bookmarks to mark the places where some kind of dialogue would normally appear. It's not even worth the time to pick apart the manifold stupidities of the plot, or raise logical questions about this corporation so evil that it seals off cities, infects them with zombie plagues, then nukes them, without fear of government consequence, for no apparent reason other than "It can."
Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a zombie movie, all right, but not just in the sense that it's a movie about zombies. It's a zombie movie in the same sense that the ambulatory dead canines featured in one of its set pieces are zombie dogs. The movie itself is undead. It has no heart, no life, no soul, no surprises, no sense of energy, no drive greater than the instinctive urge to lurch from place to place to feed on the living flesh of the better films that came before it. The genre itself is not the problem. Prior zombie films Night of the Living Dead, Dead Alive, Cemetary Man, The Evil Dead, and this year's Shaun of the Dead are all as bloody as movies get, but they all possess a certain undeniable humanity mixed in with their nasty creative verve. This feels like it was put together for the benefit of undead zombie audiences of the sort who love exploding heads but can't sit still for sufficient context and would revolt entirely if asked to parse a well-written line or genuine human feeling. It's empty, shambling, brain-dead dreck.
If any performance stands out, if only for sheer charisma, it's Guillory's. She doesn't transcend the material, but the camera loves her, and she does seem to be enjoying herself. It would be fun to see her in a better vehicle.
The two-DVD set comes with some six hours of extras, including three commentary tracks, trailers, outtakes and making-of featurettes. One documentary, "Corporate Malfeasance," which attempts to link the movie's evil Umbrella Corporation with white-collar crime in the real world, is jaw-droppingly earnest. The deleted scenes, short as they are, are actually interesting; unlike the film itself, they're not edited to death, which means that they display a rudimentary skill at building tension that the film as a whole almost completely lacks.
