Resident Evil: of Zombies and Franchise Milking

Rating: 5/10 (16 September 2010)

That is what the Resident Evil franchise appears to be down to after the second installment. This last one steers in that direction even more than its predecessor, Extinction. That third movie is where RE jumped the shark; where it showed that it had nothing more to say or show. Afterlife just stresses that even further and makes it clear that what the producers are after is just trying to squeeze the last bucks out of a withering copyright instead of trying to revitalize and relaunch it.
All that which appears in this movie feels old, overused, clichéd and, utterly predictable: the apocalypse theme; the cloning theme; the recycled bad guy; the same old zombie-Dobermans; the ludicrous resourcefulness and perseverance of the most infamous Umbrella corp.; the bad/half-bad turn-coating character; the wealth of irrelevant 'secondary' (more like nth-ary) characters; the matrix-like bullet time effects; etc.
Of course all those features wouldn't be such a grave issue if they actually contributed to the telling of an interesting and original story, but sadly this is not the case with RE4. I mean, I watched the entire movie and had not one single scare... just long sequences of boring and silly dialogs or boring and 'spectacular' action scenes of the kind that became old shortly after it was first introduced by the Matrix, more than a decade ago. What's more, I think that what really kills the mood is the total unlikeliness and absence of purpose that permeates the whole movie. Alice's clones just get slaughtered by the hundred while Alice herself flies around alone over the US and Canada looking for a bunch of survivors from the previous movie... and lo and behold!, not only does she find (some random) survivors, but none other than the brother of one of the characters from the previous movie that she just saved somewhere else... Oh boy, if that's not a lucky coincidence...
Then there's the usual decimation of the survivors proper of every 'survival horror', but rendered in an extremely uninteresting and trivial way, then the final battle with the 'end level boss', that is also very forgettable. The ending also suggests there's a chance a fifth Resident Evil will be shot... and, although I loved the first two, I hope the writers/director either get their act together or let it rest with a clean shot to the head.
Acting ranges from average to mildly crappy: Milla Jovovich seems to be trapped in a role that has become a caricature of the original Alice, the 'co-stars' Miller and Larter don't shine at all, and Wesker's blank facial expression makes him look more like a moving piece of furniture than a dangerous mutant evil bad-ass.
The wealth of cool CG effects and OK cinematography cannot, IMO, make up for all those flaws, and that's why I think this movie deserves a 5/10 (or something less).