yep, this film heralds the apocalypse all right..of Holly wood

Rating: 2/10 (17 January 2005)

Oh man. Where to start? In the first place, I rather liked the first Resident Evil. I rented it to have good laugh, and found myself enjoying it far more than I expected to. Which makes this crass, awful sequel an even worse disappointment for me. From start to finish, this movie was just painfully dreadful.
My biggest complaint, besides the so-called 'plot' and the horrible fight scenes, are the characters. The female ex-cop was such an annoying, grating person that I was praying to every God in the universe that she be mutilated in the most painful way possible. But no...Now we'll have to sit through yet another sequel with her in it, and watch her laughable attempts at acting. And maybe she'll stalk around in ten inch high heels and another tight, hard to move in outfit that a whore would be proud of wearing. That'd be great, huh?
Odod Fehr is usually a pretty good actor. It took me at least twenty minutes just to RECOGNIZE him in this film! And his cop had all the personality of tofu. Not so his 'russian' partner, being hilariously overacted by Zach Ward, who I best remember as the stoner younger brother off the Fox sitcom Titus.
The whiny reporter wasn't an asset to the cast, but then no one was except for the comic relief, a stereotypical black criminal dressed like a pimp and with gold plated guns. He's a hoot as he flees through the city trying to get out, stopping for a moment to ogle some dead, topless strippers. The Alice character isn't bad, although some of her powers seem a little overdone. She's superwoman, right , we got it.
I have a lot of niggling questions about what little plot that there was. For one thing-in the graveyard, the dead were rising from their graves to attack the fleeing group. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the virus only works on people who've been dead for no more than a month or so. It revives dead cells which still carry traces of electrical charge, which the body still does for about six weeks or so. So how can half rotted corpses like the one with worms crawling out of its skull still come to life and attack them? That corpse was probably over a year old. Perhaps its foolish of me to think that the movie should have internal integrity and coherence, but one can hope, right?
My brother-in-law was laughing over the scene in the church where Alice rides a motorcycle through the doors, flips off of it so that it crushes the uber beast, and then shoots the bike so that it explodes. Did she stick a grenade in the gas tank first? Maybe the creature had exploding boogers? Who knows.
The fight on the rooftop between Alice and Nemesis was just the height of lame. And the death of Nemesis-death by helicopter-just left me roaring with laughter. And shaking my head, as well. Honestly, they couldn't have come up with something better? Not really, I guess, if you consider the lame dialog, bad acting, and stupid action scenes that proliferate in this film. You're left scratching your head more often than not, wondering if the screenwriter and director had both stayed up together sucking down a giant bong hit, and then decided to make a movie while still stoned out of their minds. My theory is that they spent their entire budget on the cool trailer, and didn't have enough left to put together a decent movie. Either that, or the director shot the entire film without looking at it.