Nice try, but not as fun as it should have been.

Rating: Null/10 (2 April 2004)

** out of ****
Resident Evil is sort of an unbalanced mixture of old-school zombie horror and new-school filmmaking and special effects. Everything about the movie has to be a lot faster (except the zombies themselves, somewhat surprisingly), there has to be martial arts complete with even some wire-fu, and it has slimy monsters that are rendered by CGI, not old-fashioned animatronics. As you can see, I was never particularly won over by the film.
Resident Evil opens in an underground laboratory called "The Hive, a top-secret facility owned by a company called the Umbrella Corporation, situated underneath Raccoon City. One of the lab workers sabotages the place, shutting the power down and unleashing a deadly virus that kills its victims and brings them back as zombies.
We then cut to a cutie naked chick (Milla Jovovich) called Alice, who awakens in a bathtub inside some large mansion; not only is she unclothed, she's also suffering from a mild form of amnesia. Before she can collect her bearings (though she has enough time to put on a dress), an elite military task force barges into the building, taking her and an outsider (Eric Mabius) to the underground facility, directly connected to the mansion. Their mission is to shut down the Red Queen, the computer controlling the lab, but they''ll have to get through flesh-eating zombies and maniacal defense systems to accomplish that.
As directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, the same man who crafted the far superior and terrifically frightening Event Horizon, Resident Evil is unfortunately lacking in much of that film's thrills and chills. Anderson shows an inconsistent hand at staging and filming action sequences; the movie's numerous shootouts and fight scenes are only mildly exciting at best, hampered too often by close-up shots of big guns and expended shells. Worse yet, all the violence is sanitized; there's hardly any blood or gore in this picture.
Actually, what's probably most memorable about the picture as a whole is how maddeningly inconsistent it is in terms of pacing and excitement. For every scene that's fun to watch, there's another that's just plot-stopping, whether it's watching it's watching the survivors move from one bland-looking corridor to another, or Milla Jovovich jump-kicking zombie dogs in slow motion, or a computer program tiresomely going over the very simple zombie rules.
There are also some glaring technical faults that I'm surprised were't fixed or edited in post-production, such as an unbearably loud industrial score that blocks out most of the expository dialogue, most of it uttered by Colin Salmon, who if you're familiar with his work, already has a pretty quiet voice that'd be inaudible matched up against anyone else in the cast.
The zombies in this movie are your basic "pale and rotting skin" undead, some with the occasional missing bits of face and flesh. Unfortunately, the zombies in this film have goofy-looking mechanical movements, as if though their joints were so stiff, they could barely show much in the way of mobility. Maybe it's the effects of rigor mortis, but this makes zombies far less enjoyable to observe.
Most of the cast ranges from non-descript to just plain awful. Easily the worst of the bunch is Michelle Rodriguez, whose only distinct trait is a perpetual frown; she's given a lot of macho dialogue, but Jenette Goldstein she is not. Surprisingly, it's Jovovich who stands out as the film's kickass heorine. Sure, she's not much of an actress, but she's got the physical stuff down pat, for the most part. And she's cute enough that I don't mind seeing her in a slinky red dress, as well as a couple of scenes that briefly reveal some of her naughty bits.
Because there's hardly any gore, Resident Evil doesn't really work all that well as a zombie flick. And because it's not scary, horror is out of the question, too. But being a zombie fan, I'm prone to forgiving movies of this ilk simply because I'm pretty easy to please. Resident Evil is a passable enough timewaster, worth a rental, but it's certainly nothing I'll ever give much thought to again.
Compared to the recent spate of zombie horror, Resident might very well be the most lackluster of the bunch. It's never as intriguing or intelligent as 28 Days Later or as marvelously thrilling as the Dawn of the Dead remake and it's never as hilariously enjoyable as the misguided House of the Dead, proving that mediocrity really can be less entertaining than plain awfulness.