Okay, another task to do. The 3rd Movie Review~
MOVIE REVIEW
Tittle : Resident Evil : Afterlife
Genre : Horror Action
Written by : Paul W.S Anderson
film and Directed by : Paul W.S Anderson
Produced by : Paul W.S Anderson, Jeremy Bolt, Don Carmody, Bernd Eichinger, etc.
Starring :
Resident Evil: Afterlife kicks off right where Extinction left
off; Alice (Jovovich) has gotten acquainted with her clones and now she’s
making due on her promise to destroy the Umbrella Corporation, the company
responsible for the creation of the T-virus, the substance that causes the
infection. After devastating Umbrella’s underground Tokyo facility, the real
Alice attempts to reunite with her friends from Extinction, Claire
(Ali Larter) and K-Mart (Spencer Locke). The problem is, upon arriving at the
supposed safe haven, Arcadia, Alaska, Alice finds only a field full of
abandoned planes, a barren beach and a rather maniacal and memory-less Claire.
Claire somewhat comes to her senses while she and Alice fly aimlessly looking
for, well, anything.
While soaring over Los
Angeles, they catch a glimpse of a group of people calling for help on the roof
of a prison. After a risky landing, the duo receives a briefing and ultimately
learns that Arcadia isn’t a place; it’s a boat. In fact, they can see the boat
in the distance. The trouble is, they’ve got no way of reaching it for the
prison gates are swarming with undead.
Afterlife’s multiple Jovovich opening is quite
impressive. Half the fun of these films is seeing Jovovich pull off impossible
stunts while annihilating hordes of zombies. Multiply that by about a dozen
Alices and you get a fantastically deadly sequence. The sad thing is that once
the Umbrella raid comes to a close, Afterlife turns into a
completely different movie.
You’re instantly
detached from everything that happened in the opening once Alice arrives in
Alaska and, minus a minor scuffle with Claire, the film is basically devoid of
action for quite a while as well. In fact, up until this point, save for a
brief introductory show-and-tell during which a woman indulges in human flesh,
we’ve yet to see a zombie. Things start to look up as we find ourselves in a
new situation involving a group of survivors who’ll ultimately be killed off
one-by-one. If only those characters weren’t so generic, perhaps that initial
excitement would have had a lingering effect, but no.
In addition to Claire
and Alice, we’re trapped in the prison with a cliché stuck-up film producer
(Kim Coates), his loyal intern (Norman Yeung), a buff basketball star (Boris
Kodjoe), a wannabe actress who, you probably guessed it, wound up waiting
tables (Kacey Barnfield), an expendable character who’s quite obviously the
first to go (Fulvio Cecere) and an incarcerated Wentworth Miller. This is
easily the worst portion of the film not only because there’s zero fighting,
but because the characters are so weak and some of the performances are
downright laughable. Much of the time in the prison is spent chatting and when
you’re submerged in conversations involving uninteresting characters, odds are,
what they’re discussing is just as mundane. Miller makes for a fine action
hero, but when the guy attempts to display emotion, whether it be that of a
potentially dangerous killer or a loving brother just reunited with his sister,
he either takes it way too far or falls flat entirely. Even worse is Shawn
Roberts’ comically over-the-top portrayal of Umbrella’s #1, Albert Wesker.
While these moments are
enthralling and impressively choreographed, they’re still not enough to offset
the irrational plot. Everything is just so poorly developed. Afterlife feels
as though it’s three different movies mashed into one.
