Absolutely horrible

Rating: 1/10 (21 April 2005)

I didn't care much for the original Resident Evil movie, yet it did manage to work here and there as a trendy horror movie enough that it earned a spot on my DVD shelf. This one, as I feared, is all style, no substance, very much like AVP, Walking Tall, and all of these new generation actioners with slick-looking trailers but no teeth.
Basically, it's 90 some minutes of a few people strutting around striking cool poses, always trying to look cool in blurry action sequences that defy physics. That may sound good to action fans, but believe me, the whole movie is a hollow experience. There's no character development, nothing to make any of us care about any one of the cast of characters within it. As in the first movie, the universe apparently revolves around Paul W.S. Anderson's wife, Milla "ALICE" Jovovich, who now has mutant abilities.
The zombies in this movie, which is why a lot of people like me would come to see a movie like this for, are perhaps the greatest crime in this film. If they could have just gotten the zombies right, I could forgive a lot of the quick-cut garbage. The very few sequences zombies are seen, *you can't even see them!* I have no idea what they were doing, but it seems whenever a zombie(s) is on-screen, the camera begins shaking terribly and the screen gets blurry and in slow-mo, then begins showing you a hard-to-see montage of zombies (again blurry cam employed), so you can literally see nothing but vague outlines of the zombies marching around. And I may not be 100% up on my Resident Evil game lore (I've beaten Zero and 1 for Gamecube), but most zombies I'm aware of in film don't die when you break their neck. But egads, if you're making a zombie movie, just make a zombie movie. It's like the director or cinematographer Also, like Resident Evil before it (and this may be a budgetary issue), it seemed like the people making the movie forgot they were making an R-rated movie. Violence is MTV quick-cut to the point where you can't tell what's going on in any scene with anything other than two people talking to each other, and the gore is minimal. There's a couple of scenes with nudity... admittedly, quite good nudity, but they seem to serve the only reminder to the audience that they're watching an R movie.
Watching the movie and dabbling in the Resident Evil games, RE:A seems more video game-like than the damn video game series, which at least were imbued with a healthy dosage of effective Japanese horror ala Parasite Eve, Ringu, etc..
One thing... RE:A does make a zombie fan very appreciative that George Romero is finally able to do his 4th zombie movie, Land of the Dead, and that should be out in June.