Not terrible but way below average

Rating: 3/10 (6 February 2005)

Alice (Milla Jovovich) wakes up in a Racoon city hospital to discover the deadly T-virus has swept threw the city, turning everything it comes in contact with into ravenous flesh-eating Zombies and genetic mutants. In the right hands, this film really could have been...something, but it was more or less botched by Paul Anderson. I don't hate Anderson, He has lots of potential to make good movies (He proved that with the atmospheric "Event Horizon", which is no doubt his best film to date)but his love of unrealistic action often destroy his films. First-time director Alexander Witt's directional debut is similar to Anderson's writing--all style, no substance. There's no suspense, no tension, nothing. Just lots of mindless stunts. That brings me to the most annoying fault here. The action! it's non-stop, which is NOT a good thing. There are so many scenes here that were thrown in because the makers knew video-game-obsessed and intellectually-deprived (Sorry, but it's true!) kids would make up the majority of the films audience. Because of this, the rules of the T-virus that were established in the first Resident Evil have been thrown away in favor of more action. The most laughable example is when an entire legion of zombies pop from a graveyard--even when they aren't effected by the T-virus! Good to see the people making films today care so much about not insulting the audience's intelligence, isn't it?
Anyways, the acting is wooden by most of the principle cast, the characters are cliché'd typecasts (The tough female lead, the jive-talking' black dude, the deranged scientist, I'm sure there were more but it's already slipping from my mind as I write...) and the "science"...what little science there WAS behind the T-virus, anyways...was laughable.
The special effects range from very good to down-right awful. The Nemesis make-up looked great, the gore effects were well-done and the zombies were alright, but the CGI here...wow, they say that CG effects are getting 'better' these days, what they *really* mean is "CGI is getting cheaper, so now we can create it faster and not have to put any effort or work or creativity into it".
The ending was just stupid. So, Alice is a god now, huh? Wow, like running down buildings and being able to jump twenty feet in the air and not getting even singed by flames during an explosion (Aided only by a fire blanket) isn't enough, now she can kill people by just looking at them!
This was a dumb, mindless movie with no brains, no atmosphere, nothing but action scene after action scene. It's part of the of the further degradation of Hollywood today.
3/10, though that's a little bit TOO generous...