Little intrigue, lots of opportunity missed.

Rating: 6/10 (7 May 2004)

Resident Evil undoubtedly works far better on the small screen than it did at the cinema. There is no way any director (no matter how experienced) can bring a video game to life without sacrificing art in the process. Anderson has been here before with Mortal Kombat but injected into both movies enough competency and style to make them respectable in their own right.
With Resident Evil he has given us a decent story with a touch of complication and a fair amount of suspense. My main gripe is the fact that the movie looks far too slick to be as truly disturbing as the grainy and filthy Zombie movies of the '70s. Plus the violence isn't all that graphic but there is still plenty of fun to be had in watching a bunch of office workers turn into the living dead and it's scary how cheaply their lives are considered by the Umbrella Corp. they work for. I'm certainly not going to work in an office for a company like that if that's what they're going to do to me.
The characters are thin but not entirely one-dimensional. You do end up siding with some of them and feel urgency in their futile escape from the underground skyscraper (shouldn't that be 'Groundscraper' then?). Milla Jovovich is cuter here than she was in Fifth Element or Zoolander but Michelle Rodriguez just plain annoys me. All I've ever seen her play is a moody Latino who frowns all the time. It's time for here to try and expand her range a bit and I wish someone else played her character.

Video games will never make for classic movies. They can be mind-numbingly terrible (Super Mario Brothers, Double Dragon) or competent, such as this. Just turn a blind eye to the really, really bad FX at the end when a CGI monster goes on the rampage. My old Commodore 64 was capable of better graphics.
The DVD is in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen and a choice of Dolby 5.1 or DTS 5.1 soundtracks which sound great but, as a result, also serve to highlight he meaningless and clichéd Marco Beltrami/Marylin Manson 'score'.