Movie Review: Resident Evil: Afterlife

by KYW's Bill Wine --

Who says we don't recycle enough?

Here's yet another sequel to a doomsday zombie flick based on (y'know, "inspired by") the horror video game series "Resident Evil," a science fiction action-horror thriller about a virus infection that has ravaged the world's people, turning victims into the flesh-eating undead.

Talk about an afterlife.

Resident Evil: Afterlife follows Resident Evil (2002), Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), and Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) as the fourth big-screen entry in the franchise.

And this is in 3-D, of course, this being 2010.

Oh, goodie: the first video game flick to be shot in 3-D.  Here's a movie that shows off its 3-D process like a kid showing off his nifty new bike on Christmas.  Well, its 3-D-ness is about all this tedious exercise has going for it.

Oh, well, at least the fight scenes, with all sorts of items hurtling toward us, engage our depth perception, if nothing else, in a soporific thriller that puts the z-z-z-z in zombies.

The plot picks up where silver-screen installment number three left off.

Milla Jovovich returns as the seemingly indestructible heroine, Alice, a former security officer with the Umbrella Corporation in Racoon City, whose exposure to the T-virus gained her superhuman, telekinetic abilities.

Ops from Umbrella have been hunting her down, intending to use her DNA to control the mutation of the virus, while Alice seeks revenge against the corporation and especially its chairman, Albert Wesker, played this time by Shawn Roberts.

Meanwhile, Alice is trying to destroy Umbrella's Tokyo headquarters and has been roaming around the world, trying to find survivors and lead them back to safety while finding and killing those infected.

She proceeds to Alaska, where there is supposed to be a virus-free colony called Arcadia.

When, later, she arrives in the ruins of Los Angeles, she finds and encounters a small group of survivors who have been in hiding ever since the virus first broke out.

Ali Larter also returns as Claire, a survivor who is now suffering from amnesia, while Wentworth Miller plays Claire's older brother, working with a military unit combating the infected, but now in prison.

Writer-producer-director Paul W.S. Anderson (Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon, AVP: Alien vs. Predator, Death Race), now married to Jovovich, returns to the franchise that he launched with Resident Evil in 2002, this time concentrating more on the sinister Umbrella Corporation than on the zombie angle.

But he's an inept storyteller, not bothering to explain everything going on, as if depending on fans of the video game to fill in the blanks; not following the rules that his script has already established; not including any connective tissue as one set piece segues arbitrarily into another; and not editing out or even trimming the several monotonous and endless shoot-em-up scenes.

It's during the latter that we start to think longingly about the afterlife.

Drooling faces and bleeding heads abound, while such inconsequential elements as interesting dialogue, subtlety, storytelling, wit, originality, imagination, or actual performance are nowhere to be found.

And, frighteningly, the film is open-ended, which means we'll probably get a fifth installment, which we need about as much as we needed this fourth one.

So we'll infect 1 star out of 4 for the pointless, feckless, joyless, mindless, worthless, and senseless survivalist saga.  This visually arresting but otherwise inert thriller about the undead is dead on arrival.