But is it Resident Evil?

Rating: 6/10 (30 January 2005)

Like the original games and the first movie, this has the lurching zombies and a population infected by a powerful and recklessly insensitive megacorp. It has loads of firearms, comic-book action sequences, and characters in contemporary clothing that are just distinctive enough to look like comic hero costumes. It also has homages to previous horror films.
Every other Resident Evil game and the original movie has presented new stories that take advantage of the setting, situation and themes without disrupting the continuity, proving that it could have been done for this movie. This movie deviates from the canons by reinventing characters and running roughshod over the established story lines.
Was this necessary? Viewers who've been following the story before this installment will find the contradictions distracting. Audiences new to the series could've been given a good story without revealing or revising what had been served up before. Is it such a bad idea to give them just enough to leave them wanting if you still have games to sell? Resident Evil was rich with mysteries to be explained, new territory to be explored, but instead of cultivating the franchise this movie ham-handedly grabbed for the quick buck.
Alice and Jill were easy on the eyes and very powerful action figures, far too good at surviving to be good survival horror figures. Superhuman kung-fu masters aren't exactly beating the odds as they engage in battles that you know they'll win before they begin. Ho hum. No suspense. No menace. Even the monster is just another action figure in latex. I wasn't surprised to find Jill Valentine likable and interesting because I never cared for her in the previous Resident Evils. With that great a character discrepancy between the game and movie, I'm pleased to see no adaptation of the characters I actually did like (geniune thanks to Emily Bergl for dropping out.)