Shades of Uwe Boll...!!!

Rating: 5/10 (16 February 2012)

It must be obvious to even fans of the 1st Resident Evil movie (which I actually enjoyed...loved the "shot gun cocking" ending) that at this point Anderson is just stringing set pieces and cinematic rip-offs together instead of actually writing a screen play or even bothering to construct a story line that makes sense. He's still got too much moxie to be the next Uwe Boll, but he's definitely heading in that direction.
I don't ask for a lot in my action horror thrillers, but I ask that the actions the characters take and their decisions make some kind of sense (at least in the context of the screenplay),and RE 4 is even longer on atmosphere and short on sense than the 2nd one.
-I still don't understand what Umbrella corporation's business model is supposed to be if there are no governments or corporations left to sell the damned T-virus to or what the point is of ruling the world if they can't go outside.

I still don't understand why Alice decides to sacrifice her entire army of superpowered clones in a direct assault on an Umbrella stronghold when it's obvious they would be 100 times more effective as a group running a guerrilla war, rescuing survivors, taking out entire cities worth of unarmed zombies with little difficulty. They could, if fact, save the world and take care of Umbrella almost as an afterthought once they had taken back enough of it. (Hell Umbrella might actually cooperate once they realized they had paying customers again.)

And I still don't understand why Umbrella let Claire go AFTER they'd captured her and slapped the memory-sapping device on her. I know she's there to lead Alice to the next part of the plot, but a big banner on the beach would have done the same thing. Yeah, I know, it's because they're EVIL, but it makes no sense to have Clare wondering around free to get her memory back once Alice removes the device.

There's more, of course, but I won't beat that dead horse. Instead I'll mention that Milla is still hot, and she has a sensitive, expressive countenance that supplies a badly needed human context to all the nihilism and wreckage the movie dishes out...but she still reads her lines and voice overs as if she saw them for the first time on a teleprompter. Some of the supporting cast are somewhat better, but since the characters are all blank ciphers, there isn't much they can do to distinguish themselves in my mind in the limited space they have on screen.
Also, I realize the big fight scene with Wesker is meant to be a "call out" to the fight with Agent Smith in "The Matrix", but slo-mo bullet-time has been a cliché for years now, and the fight has none of the verve and intensity of the first Matrix - it just comes off as Anderson saying "Gee, I thought The Matrix was really neat."
Worth seeing once if you are idly curious about what supposedly happens next in the RE saga, plus odd moments of visual interest and energy (Anderson isn't entirely without talent, after all).