Got the looks but not the intelligence

Rating: 6/10 (25 March 2002)

Resident Evil, the latest film from Paul Anderson--not to be confused with a much better filmmaker, Paul Thomas Anderson--looks great enough, but it feels like a feature-length compilation of familiar scenes from a handful of superior horror and/or sci-fi films, e.g. George Romero's zombie flicks, the "Alien" films, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, and The Matrix. The film doesn't break any new grounds and would have been better served, I think, as a "direct to video" release. The film features the beautiful Milla Jovovich (The Fifth Element, The Claim) who, along with several others (most notably, Michelle Rodriguez from The Fast and the Furious and Girlfight), must contain a chemical leakage at one of those secret underground laboratories which you find from time to time in sci-fi films like this. Unbeknownst to this crew, the contamination has turned all the workers in the lab into "zombies," a group of walking dead who are driven solely by the instinct to feed on living flesh. As you might have expected, the crew has to fight off the zombies, resulting in plenty of carnage and gore. Resident Evil is a gory film. What the film lacks, however, is any real suspense or genuine scares. And the soundtrack is one of the loudest I have heard in a long time; I wasn't scared by the film, but several times I got scared that I might go deaf. (I guess the philosophy behind this tactic is: if you can't scare them, jolt them.) I should also mention that the film features several almost nude scenes of Jovovich which are sort of disappointing and anti-climactic (you sort of keep wishing that the damn towel, etc. would fall, but it never does) but might turn out, in the long run, to be the best part of this dead-brained film.