How much more ridiculous can these movies get?

Rating: 6/10 (3 January 2011)

Let me be clear, despite my slightly positive rating, Resident Evil: Afterlife is in no way a "good" movie. But it is entertaining, in a ridiculous, inexplicable way.
I'm a fan of this series, even though that admission would probably cause some people to doubt any and all of my credibility when it comes to movies. The last three RE flicks were just dumb, fun action movies with zombies, and I could appreciate them for what they were. No, they don't follow the games very closely, and no they weren't scary in the slightest, but I still liked them (to varying degrees). Milla Jovovich is a credible and likable action star and seeing her jumping through the air, kicking and shooting things in the face never really got old, for me. Plus, this series has a habit of including some pretty hot actresses in each installment (including this one), which I heartily approve of.
Afterlife, to be quite honest, is a train-wreck. But, it's like a train-wreck where no one gets injured, and the train cars do some crazy flips in slow motion and there are tons of explosions and everyone who happened to see it had a pretty good time watching it. Writer and director Paul W.S. Anderson has completely (and wisely) given up on trying to make these movies make sense in the slightest way, and let all logic fall right off the B- movie cliff. There's just so many cheesy, absurd things going on at any given moment that it's almost an overload. The almost constant slow motion, the AWFUL acting, the absurd dialogue, the concrete-tunneling zombies, the guarantee that exactly every 3 minutes, a zombie or monster was going to magically appear behind a character and kill/almost kill them, the random elements from the games strewn about haphazardly...it's all just so ridiculous.
This truly awful movie appealed to me in a perverse way. It certainly didn't bore me, that's for sure. But, you should be very wary if your tolerance (and maybe even fondness?) for a disaster isn't equal to mine. Resident Evil: Afterlife destroys the limits of absurdity like one of Alice's shotguns to the face. And yet, after the extra scene during the credits, I actually felt eager to see the next Resident Evil movie. Maybe I'm the one who's absurd.