Distracting enough for undemanding genre fans

Rating: Null/10 (22 April 2005)

With the virus breaking out of the "secure" Hive, the Umbrella Corporation order Racoon City to be sealed off and isolated  even if it traps most of the residents inside with the undead infected. The Corporation's scientists are all evacuated, with the exception of one who has lost his daughter within the city. He refuses to leave and turns to the only member of the Corporation's staff still left inside for help  this person being none other than Alice. Joining a band of armed survivors, things don't look good with Alice running out of time - but then the Corporation take the decision, to protect their stockholders and executives, that the city will be destroyed by a nuclear strike at dawn. Meanwhile they take the opportunity to release the Nemesis programme into the city to test its effectiveness.
Although the first film was not actually any good, it still did enough to please those who knew what they were getting into when they sat to watch it, and enough of the target audience must have gone to see it to justify a sequel a few years later. Despite clearly having a wider playpen within the story, film doesn't feel like a massive budget has been poured into it in some areas. Specifically the plot and dialogue are pretty weak; the attempt to escape Racoon City has a few things piled onto it to try and up the ante but none of them really ring true and it mainly comes off feeling like the narrative was an afterthought. This is backed up by the poor dialogue and total lack of characterisation in all areas. Of course if you are target audience for this film then it seems unlikely that such things will matter to you and it probably does what you need it to do. There are fights, zombies, big guns, things going bang and men in monster suits. None of it is anything special but it is noisy enough for the teenage male target audience.
As with the first film, the theme of the big corporation is not used that well and, although it is stated how evil the company is, we are never really given a sense of them in the same way as some other "sinister forces at work" movies have done. The direction makes it all look slick enough but forgets to add the horror and tension that it really should have had. Jovovich is pretty handy but throwing in the odd scene where she looks angry and hurt over her past is not a replacement for delivering a character. The rest of the cast are pretty low rent and make the cast in the first film look better. Guillory is a "feisty action woman" who looks like she is from the same cookie cutter that produced Buffy, Charmed, Alias and a hundred others, she does the basics and no more. Likewise Epps, Fehr, Vavasseur and others just play their roles without having any real charisma or anything different, although Epps is actually quite amusing in the outtakes on the DVD! Overall this did what I expected it to do  it was noisy, uninteresting and par for the genre course at best. It has an audience of course and I guess some sections of that will enjoy it but not that many.