Didn't Even Try

Rating: 3/10 (19 January 2017)

Resident Evil: Afterlife was a stark and precipitous drop off from its predecessors. Besides being one long rock video with bad CGI, the acting was poor as well as the plot. Not to mention that at times I didn't know if I was watching Resident Evil, Tremors, Silent Hill or The Matrix.
Let me say this: I get that slow motion and stop motion makes an action sequence cool but chill out a bit willya. It was way overdone like a child playing with his newest toy. Take out half the slow motion scenes and the movie is ten minutes shorter.
Speaking of the action scenes: there's action and then there's "come on, get real." I'm all for bending the laws of physics at times for an exciting movie but my brain has a certain point in which it refuses to ignore the blatant impossibilities. More than once I found myself rolling my eyes at the otherworldly stunts. Just tell me they're in the Matrix so I can mentally accept what I'm seeing. The extreme action and the paradoxically calm faces that accompanied it were too much to bear.
There is yet another exception I have with this movie. It's not fair but my idea of zombies has been largely defined by The Walking Dead and George Romero. Resident Evil is a totally different production, I know, and furthermore it's based upon a video game which probably has a totally different set of rules for its hordes of mobile carcasses. For all I know, the undead beings in Resident Evil aren't even zombies; they may be another creation entirely. But, since they look like zombies and behave like zombies I'm holding them to the zombie rules.
So, with that, I have certain expectations that were thoroughly defied in this movie. I found these zombies to be fast, strong, slightly cognitive and able to be silent when needing the element of surprise. Look, that is not my vision of a zombie and it's simply not fair. Part of the reason zombies are slow, dumb and weak is that 1.) they're dead and all higher brain functions have ceased and 2.) there are millions of them!! They already have a significant advantage in that they can only be killed with head shots (which is tough enough as it is) then you make their numbers multitudinous which is a recipe for invincibility as a species. There's no need after that to also make them strong, fast, sneaky and somewhat smart. The remaining humans have no chance!
Overall this movie just lacked intelligence and originality. They really went the mindless action movie route while liberally borrowing thematic and cinematic ideas from so many other known movies. The bottom line is they didn't even try and that's the saddest part.