Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)

Directed by Alexander Witt
Written by Paul W.S. Anderson
Starring
- Milla Jovovich
- Sienna Guillory
- Oded Fehr
- Thomas Krestchmann
- Sophie Vavasseur
Produced by Paul W.S. Anderson, Jeremy Bolt, and Don Carmody

Without looking back on my review of the first movie, I really can’t claim to have much memory of it. And that, I think, encapsulates the based-on-a-video-game movie experience better than the other common elements: The stylized settings, the characters with personas rather than personalities, the rocktronica soundtracks. Because a videogame, meant to engage a player for hours over the course of weeks and months, has to focus on in-the-moment exhilaration rather than any kind of closure or catharsis; a videogame can’t afford to be memorably satisfying, because its success depends on players returning again and again for enjoyment which can only be had during the exact moment of play. I doubt that anyone involved in the production of the Resident Evil movies has consciously formulated any such theorem of gameplay, but they have nevertheless managed to translate that facet of the gameplaying experience to the feature films, providing exhilarating spectacle without enough meat to merit consideration or retention in memory afterward.

Minus the exhilaration part. Because there’s still no way to provide a substitute for the actual experience of participation in the feature film version (which is why people seeking that kind of experience turn to videogames instead of movies), watching most videogame-based movies is like sitting next to someone playing the game.

I’m not willing to go back and rewatch the first movie for confirmation, but my impresson is that the initial Resident Evil movie was superior to this first sequel as a motion picture. Despite its manifest inattention to the basic craft of storytelling, there was still a cohesive core to the plot: A team must enter a secret base overrun by zombies, find out what happened, and get back out. There’s a structure there that lends a semblance of order to a bunch of cacophanous and paper-thin scenes. In this sequel, though…

Let’s put in perspective: The first Resident Evil was written, directed, and produced by Paul W.S. Anderson, a man with some fair facility in managing the translation of a script to the screen, even while he evidences no talent at all for the scriptwriting itself. This time out, the directorial chores are handled by longtime professional but firsttime director Alexander Witt; and in addition to continuing as producer, Anderson retains to himself the task of the screenplay. In other words, he foregoes the role for which he has more discernable skill and sticks to the role he fills poorly. Frankly, Paul W.S. Anderson couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag, even with neon signs pointing the way to the exit.

On to the movie, then. Because the underground research facility infested with the zombiefying T-virus in the last movie is directly beneath major population center Raccoon City, the next center for infection is the city itself. From idyllic suburb-ringed metropolis in the morning, the city has become a bedlam by evening, with bloodthirsty zombies being dealt with as a law-enforcement issue. The only people with any inkling of what’s going on are part of The Umbrella Corporation, which is an amalgam of every heavyhanded cliche about soulless multinationals who engage in EEE-vil simply on principle. The dark-suited corporate puppet in charge (Thomas Krestchmann — his name is given in the credits as “Major Cain,” but I couldn’t swear that he’s ever identifed in the movie itself) immediately locks down and quarantines the entire city, because corporations can do that. Really.

Because this is a videogame movie, our main characters are the kick-assiest ones trapped in Raccoon City. First up, we’ve got Alice (Milla Jovovich), the survivor of the previous installment. She’s skinnier than Ripley, high-kickier than Cynthia Rothrock, and bullet-timier than Keanu Reeves. She’s also blankfacier than Chuck Norris; I hope she gets an acting job sometime soon in which she’s actually called upon to act again, or she might lose the facility entirely.

Then we’ve got a threesome that quickly joins forces with Alice: Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) is a tough rule-breaking cop whose wardrobe is wildly inappropriate for any law enforcement officer not on a vice stakeout. She’s almost exactly the same character as Alice, but with storebrand batteries instead of Duracells. With her is Peyton (Raz Adoti), a fellow cop who gets bitten early on — and we all know what that means — and Reporter Girl Terri (Sandrine Holt), included just because there should be one beautiful person in this movie who’s also utterly useless.

Between Alice and the cop/cop/reporter trio, they fight zombies in the street, and fight zombies in a church, and fight zombies in a graveyard (hey, novel concept!), and eventually they stumble upon a plot, just waiting for someone to take advantage of it. Wheelchair-bound Dr. Ashford (Jared Harris), one of the main architects of the original T-virus discovery, is evacuated by Umbrella forces to the safety of the periphery early on, but his daughter Angela (Sophie Vavasseur) is still trapped in her junior high. Ashford makes contact with Alice & Co. via the pervasive surveillance network over the city (because corporations can do that, really) and offers them a deal: Rescue his daughter, and he’ll get them access to a helicopter out of the city before it’s “sanitized” at dawn with a tactical nuke.

The story idea of a desperate rescue mission is scarcely original — it was old when John Carpenter made Escape From New York in 1981 — but it’s a perfectly respectable old workhorse, if the writer knows what to do with it. Anderson emphatically doesn’t. Thus we finally get to the introduction of the plot far too late, because we’ve been too busy watching scene after scene of pretty-but-pointless stunts and pyrotechnics. And even when the plot finally rears its tardy head, we barely get a chance to recognize it before the attention-deficit script hauls us away. Long before there’s anything for them to do in the story, we keep cutting back to a unit of Umbrella mercs who were abandoned inside the city, and whose tactical plan is to stand in the middle of the indefensible street and shoot anything that shuffles as their numbers are whittled down by the undead until the plot finally has need of them. There’s also a lone pimp, L.J. (Mike Epps), who wanders in and out of scenes until he finally becomes a less-than-important component of the main action.

And just because a city overrun by zombies isn’t sexy enough, we also get a few CGI bioweapon creatures with tongues and tentacles (early on — then they disappear), a few zombie police dogs, and “Nemesis” — a Frankenstein-booted Umbrella-engineered killing machine that looks like Iron Maiden’s “Eddie” on serious steroids. In a bizarre reversal of the Hero’s Death Exemption, no one is willing to take a headshot at Nemesis, saving him for the final hand-to-hand with Alice.

All of which adds up to a movie which would be perfectly suited for an audience of fourteen-year-old males addled on Mountain Dew: Code Red. For an audience more discerning than that, the entire movie is so unimpressive in its continuous flash and bluster that it’s easy to start forgetting it before it’s even over.