Entertaining Shlock

Rating: 5/10 (17 September 2004)

The first film was definitely a lot better than this one...as a film and as PREQUEL to the video games. That film was very good from beginning to end. Despite the simplistic storyline...it was very entertaining and well put together. Even the soundtrack was great.
As for the second film...I will blatantly say that it was dumb...but that doesn't at all make it not ENTERTAINING. But what can we expect without Anderson working entirely on this project and a newbie director at the helm? Aside from the unnecessary opening commentary about what happened in the first film, the movie starts out pretty good. The movie begins to dramatically cheapen after the church sequence, but here's the reasons why:
a) Jill Valentine is a paper-thin character. If you've played the video games, you know who she is, what happened to her prior to the events in the second movie and why she was "disgraced" from the STARS unit. In this film, they don't explain ANYTHING. So basically she's just another random character dressed like a slut and carrying a gun.
b) STARS isn't a special unit in the RPD...they ARE the RPD. I think this was a huge discrepancy between the games and the movie and goes along with why they never explained why Jill was disgraced. I think the writers decided to drop STARS involvement with the mansion incident completely to avoid a lot of explanation..though they could have sat down both Jill and Alice in the film and had them discuss things to bring even the audience up to speed. Instead they briefly mention that STARS is highly skilled and one of two targets to test out Nemesis on.
c) The Church sequence. This section starts out just fine with the protagonists, even though this is the only time we see any of the lickers, but then when Milla comes crashing through the window...yeah it was fun...but what does that have to do with anything? How did she know there were human survivors in there? She can detect virus carriers, but the whole city is overrun...why would she come crashing in there blindly?
d) The graveyard was a totally unnecessary sequence. If the town was overrun with the virus...why would completely intact zombies rise from the ground in the first place...or all at the same time?
e) At first I thought going to the movie that the whole plot theme of Milla being genetically altered was stupid since she did just fine in the first film. But as reference to Code Veronica...it's passable. However, setting her up to fight Nemesis was a total eye-rolling experience. I definitely wanted to see her confront Nemesis and remember Matt in the process...but this was totally the wrong way to go about it.
f) The epilogue was totally disappointing. The movie should have ended with just the news reports about the Umbrella cover-up. All the final hospital stuff should have been left for the third film...where it would have been a great opening sequence. It just feels tacked on at the end here.
Anyway, that's my breakdown of what was wrong with the film. It's made and we can't change it. So needless to say, it was silly, but no less entertaining. I enjoyed it moreso the second time I watched...since this time I was just watching for the action and any other references I may have missed the first time through. Watch it if you enjoyed the first movie or you like the games...avoid it if you have no idea what's really going on in the video game-to-movie world.