15 Bucks I Don't Want Back. I Love America.

Rating: 7/10 (12 September 2010)

More K-Mart. More K-Mart. MORE K-MART!
I know: one model-slash-actress should be enough. Three female slashies plus four slashie guys verges on overkill. Watching skinny women (even adults) flip, flop and fly in leggings of their own design is great fun. But you throw in a teenager toward the end, and I get nostalgic for the days when Milla Jovovich wasn't quite so grown up. It's awful of me to say since, in her mid-thirties, she looks fabulous. Except she doesn't look twenty.
Should I hate myself for admitting my opinion? Hey, it cuts both ways. I don't look as good as I used to either. And I never looked as good as Milla. But I digress.
For what it is, a 4th-installment video-game spin-off 3D spectacle with less story, plot, or character than the slimmest of its forebears, it's a fine effort. Lots of shooting, stabbing, cutting, biting, crashing, yeah, yeah, yeah. "Afterlife" destroys Tokyo better than most Godzilla movies do. And while I think it's a mistake to top-load a Milla movie with multiple Millas and then spiral down to one, there are compensations. Watching people get blown apart with coin-loaded shotguns is better than, say, not watching that.
To be fair, these movies do have one character, and (usually; definitely in this case) one actor who deserves the title. Milla's better than any other single factor in these things, though this time she has fewer opportunities to act than in the previous three; but that's okay, because the combined presence of Ali Larter and Wentworth Miller is nearly enough to stop me from paying to see any slashie act again, ever.