Milla Jojovich:  Alice
Ali Larter:  Claire Redfield
Wentworth Miller:  Chris Redfield
Shawn Roberts:  Alex Wesker
Kim Coates:  Bennet
Boris Kodjoe:  Luther West
Spencer Locke:  K-Mart

Release Date: September 10, 2010
Studio: Screen Gems
Genre: Sci-Fi / Fantasy
Rated: R     1 hr 37 mins

CAST:

Resident Evil: Afterlife

September 17, 2010

Reviewer: Rottenbucher

DIRECTOR:

Paul W.S. Anderson

*Comments:

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Milla Jojovich and the zombies are back in another celluloid yarn loosely based on the savagely popular Resident Evil video games. This time in 3D and picking up where Resident Evil: Extinction left off.  While Extinction upped the ante, Afterlife takes two steps back and shuffles.

Alice (Jojovich) still has lead to pump into the Umbrella Corporation Headquarters. So she and her clones make it over to Tokyo where they blast to smithereens the massive underground bunker and duke it out with Umbrella big wig, Alex Wesker (Shawn Roberts). The real Alice survives and is off to reunite with her friends from Extinction in Arcadia, Alaska. Except when she lands her plane in Alaska, there is nothing but an empty field of abandoned airplanes.  She manages to find a brainwashed Claire (Ali Larter) and bags the Alaskan adventure for a warmer climate. Alice eventually ends up in Los Angeles where she and Claire crash land on a prison.  Claire reunites with her brother (Wentworth Miller), zombies swarm, things go awry and the group is off to the real Arcadia, which is actually a massive oil tanker drifting out in the Pacific.

The 3D of Afterlife is pretty amazing. Everything else about the film is not. Extinction seems to now be the oddball of the franchise.  With its desert zombies and fantastic elements, it moved the series along nicely by getting out of the claustrophobic locations. While Afterlife attempts to thicken the plot, it seems to have sacrificed story for the sake of bombastic action. 

The opening sequence is rather breathtaking. At times it seems to mimic The Matrix and even Jojovich’s panned Ultraviolet. The Alice clones in sleek black cat suits make for nice eye candy and the endless tsunami of bullets, spent brass, blood and bombs is almost unsettling. It’s hard to follow, but still a sight to see. Then the film falls apart only to be redeemed by more violence, zombie mayhem and kooky slow-motion.  Watching a soaking wet Claire duke it out with some ultra-zombie in a prison bathroom is also a lot of fun, but ultimately nothing more than cheap 3D thrills.  There also is the final battle in the Arcadia where the bowels of an oil tanker is stark white and sterile. The Matrix-styled mayhem ensues again, but this time it almost looks like something out of Michael and Janet Jackson’s Scream video. The blood splatter is great and the endless barrage of bullets headed towards the viewers is neat, but how we got this far in the film is almost unknown.

And that is what kills Resident Evil: Afterlife. It jumps all over the place with Alice still on this endless quest to destroy anything and everything with Umbrella Corporation logo.  First they’re in Tokyo, then Alaska, then Los Angeles, then in the Pacific. Somehow Claire got brainwashed by this mechanical spider that was stuck to her chest, but it’s never explained, even when seen again later in the film.  The prison sequence is rather lax on logic and the teeming dead surrounding the location are seldom seen.  When the zombies do appear, they are quickly dispatched or mutated to have tentacles coming out of their drooling maws. That’s never explained either so it must be yet another T-Virus mutation or…  Eh whatever; there’s zombies, babes, guns, mutant dogs, swords and explosions.

Resident Evil: Afterlife is simply fun on the base level.  Jojovich and Larter make for a pair of hot action babes and said action is killer in some spots and goofy in others.  There are still zombies for the zombie fanatic and even references to the fifth video game for the nerds in the audience.  And it’s important to be reminded that these are films based on video games.  It’s just that Extinction seemed a bit more and it’s a bummer that Afterlife lacks so much in terms of focus and storytelling.  At least it’s in 3D.  Somehow that makes a rather pointless film just a wee bit better. Recommended only for zombie-action freaks and the Jojovich-obsessed.