Boredom, thy name is Resident Evil

Rating: 5/10 (24 August 2005)

I was originally going to give this a 6, but then realised I reserve that for movies that didn't quite work but never gave up trying. Resident Evil isn't really in that category. Strangely, the movie is slick and well-made, and full of wonderful production design. However, this can't hide the fact that it fails entirely to excite the viewer. A damn shame really considering the game franchise it derives its story from is actually more effectively scary than most horror of recent years.
Maybe I was making a mistake, expecting what is effectively a big-budget mainstream flick with a major cast to be tense or scary, god knows most of them aren't, but it was the fact that Resident Evil failed totally to make me even worried for anyone until I fell asleep watching it and a large explosion jolted me out of my kip. You're supposed to care about the main characters in a horror movie and they're supposed to be vulnerable to some extent so that you get the impression they could die, therefore making you fear for their safe escape from the situation. This is where Resident Evil falls flat on it's face. Milla Jovovich's Alice is pretty much unstoppable during the movie, as are the other three or four key characters, who either get saved by Milla all the time or are fully capable of making their own way through events, and this removes all tension from proceedings.
What compounds this problem is that Resident Evil commits an awful lot of horror movie faux-pas. There are so many scenes that even during the movie don't stand up to scrutiny. So much of this movie should have been killed at the screen writing phase, but they left it all in. For instance you don't have your characters physically fighting the zombies with their bare hands, not only does it look stupid, it doesn't work as a theory. Yeah zombies are pretty slow, and if you can't find a way of stopping one zombie on it's own or avoiding it, you may need to book into a 'special' school, but if you try to kung-fu fight twenty odd zombies with your bare hands, I don't care if you're Bruce Lee, you're gonna die. While for mainstream movie fans who don't watch a lot of horror this could perhaps look cool, to a horror fan, it looks really stupid and is something we don't want to see. Unless it's in something like Braindead which is supposed to be dumb anyway.
Also, going back to the lack of tension, main character Alice is NOT an easy girl to relate to. In a horror movie, you must have someone helming the movie that you can relate to, otherwise as stated before, you don't care whether they live or die. Alice can inexplicably fight like Jackie Chan, a fact that seems wildly implausible. Simply put, if the girl in Freddy vs Jason ran up a wall and kicked Jason round the head sending him flying through a window pane, it would have ruined our impression of her as a normal girl determined to stop the madness around her. It does with Alice but director Anderson doesn't seem to care.
Anyway, I think I've maybe gone into a bit too much detail, but the bottom line is that the emphasis in this movie is too heavily on action set pieces and being cool, and not enough on the accepted genre trappings of horror. Sometimes this can work, like in Versus, but Anderson doesn't have the balls, gore or naked intensity to pull it off. If you watched this with no prior knowledge of it's apparent genre or the video game it's based on, you'd probably enjoy it a lot more and maybe even give it a 7 or an 8, but for me the removal of the 'one person, 200 zombies and only a gun between them and certain death' vibe of the game, and the constant shocking ignorance of basic flaws in certain scenes makes it a dull, boring piece of style-over-substance mainstream tosh.