Zombie-A-Thon #6 - Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) - With Spawnpoint Spoilers

Resident Evil movies are schlock. They are background noise. They are hot chicks kicking monster ass and lots of gunfire. They are heaving mounds of cliches and stereotypes, bad writing and terrible acting.

I do love them so. I'm going to skip the first one - seen it too many times - and head into Resident Evil: Apocalypse in which undead, flesh-eating freaks learn to love again.

Synopsis

Set immediately after the first film, Apocalypse follows a small group of survivors as they try to escape zombie infested Raccoon City. Introduced to the series are Jill Valentine (uber-hottie Sienna Guillory), Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr who was pretty good in The Mummy and The Mummy Returns) and Mike Epps as LJ Wade. There are some other people...but we do need cannon fodder, right?

When the film starts, the city is already being overrun. The police are overwhelmed and the citizens are try to flee through checkpoints set up by the Umbrella Corporation, makers of fine viral apocalypses. The local Umbrella head honcho sees the incident as a great place to test two projects related to the T-virus (the zombie disease). Project Alice (Milla Jovovich as a super-powered killing machine and survivor of the first film, Alice) and Project Nemesis, a massive mutant with flesh stapled over his eyes (why?) and a Gatling gun. Valentine is a Raccoon City cop, Olivera an Umbrella commando stuck in the city with a dwindling squad of soldiers and LJ is the "urban" comic relief. Disposable characters include Sandrine Holt as wannabe ace report Terri Morales, Jared Harris as Umbrella sci-guy Charles Ashford and Sophie Vavasseur as his little daughter, Angela Ashford. The last character is important because she is left in the city during the evacuation and her father contacts our motley collection heroes and survivors and offers them a deal; find his daughter and he can get them out of the doomed city.

Zombie mayhem ensues, super-Milla kicks all kinds of butt, cannon fodder gets...foddered...mutant monster mayhem whittles down our plucky band, the bad guys eventually get theirs and the city is nuked. Boom.

Analysis

A Licker. Isn't he cute?

I'm not sure how you really review a film like this. The cast isn't very good; but, given the roles as written, even Olivier would have trouble bringing them to life. Milla makes a serviceable action heroine; if nothing else, she looks good in battle fashion garb and seems to be enjoying herself. The plot is so basic that it's hard to pick apart. Sure, physics are ignored, coincidence trumps logic, questions like "why is a corporation handling this and not the US Army?" aren't even asked...well, I guess there is a lot to pick at; but, you are essentially working with video game logic here. Crawl through a level, shoot the mooks, find the boss, kill it, repeat until you get to the big boss at the end of the game. Given that the movie series is based on a video game series, this is to be expected.

Jill Valentine dressed for the end of the world.

There are some neat scenes. Milla blowing up a mutant monster with a flying motorcycle in a church is one. The death of Morales at the hands and teeth of a pack of hungry zombie school kids is also pretty disturbing. There are many that don't work as well: random slow-motion shots, a graveyard with cinematic fog (as in, there's only fog in the cemetery because it looks "scarey"), ill-advised - and not funny - comic relief from the LJ. A fire blanket protects a wearer from a massive explosion. And so on.

While director Alexander Witt is no Gareth Evans (The Raid) he's pretty good at filming action sequences. Since the movie is, basically, nothing but action scenes, this is a good thing. He would later go on to do a lot of second unit work on films like Casino Royale and X-Men: First Class. Sound effects are thunderous - lots of explosions and gunshots, with a heavy metal/bombastic action score filling blasting through most of the film. Dialogue is a mix of tough guy cliches and the kind of exposition you'd find in a video game cut-scene. While the make-up effects are pretty good, the CGI for the Lickers is cartoonish and there is surprising lack of blood in the film. While not as gore free as, say, World War Z you see a lot more graphic violence in an average episode of The Walking Dead. While gore doesn't make a movie, it's absence in a zombie gunfest is noticeable.

Verdict

This is the kind of movie that, if it had been released in 1974 instead of 2004, would've been great to see at a drive-in, albeit with the inclusion of a shower scene. Drive-in movies always need a shower scene. It's loud and dumb, but mostly fun. Check it out.

Here is the trailer.