Utter utter bunk, but enjoyable bunk nonetheless...

Rating: Null/10 (10 October 2004)

I remember seeing the trailer to the original Resident Evil and thinking, 'oh dear, they've really gone and ballsed this one up quite badly'. On going to see the movie, I left the cinema if not overly impressed, then at least mildly surprised that director Paul Anderson had managed to pull one out of his ass to create a reasonably enjoyable pop corn munching horror flick. My impressions Alexander Witt's sequel, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, were much the same.
Following on almost immediately from the original, the sequel opens with the monstrous T Virus being let loose from the previous movie's lab complex into the city above. The movie follows the survivors of the disaster, including Sienna Guillory's ridiculously attired Jill Valentine, Oded Fehr's hunky mercenary Carlos Olivera, Mike Epps' stereotypical black pimp L.J. and of course the only true survivor of the original movie, Milla Jovovich's zombie beating Alice. Also set loose in the city is Nemesis, a seven-foot tall mountain of a monster packing a minigun, a rocket launcher and a bizarre S&M outfit.
Pillaging it's inspirations from a number of sources, including Dawn of the Dead, Resident Evil 2 & 3 and 28 Days Later, it's fair say that Apocalypse's plot and dialogue are not its strong points. Anderson's script is at times laughably poor. Lines like 'we're expendable assets, and we've just been expended' are so horribly clunky that it's hardly surprising the movie's acting is getting such bad press. The movie's narrative is equally cumbersome and also badly fractured. It jumps around constantly in a vain attempt to keep track of multiple plot threads, never really spending enough time with any one of them to create any satisfactory pay off at the movie's end and as such there is little depth to either the story or its characters. There are however some nice tips of the hat to existing Resident Evil fans, including an action sequence ripped straight from the opening movie of Code Veronica and little dig at the games fixed camera perspective.
In terms of acting, well I'm sure the actors were doing their best with what material they had but it might have helped if they had some slightly more talented performers on board. Milla Jovovich has proved herself several times in the past, most noticeably to the wider public as Leeloo in the Fifth Element, but she is miscast here as a tough as nails, steely eyed zombie slayer. Guillory's Jill is equally awkward as she tries to pull off a worryingly similar character Alice, all the time struggling with bad dialogue and an embarrassing costume that sticks a little too close to Resident Evil 3 for comfort. Fehr's Carlos has little to do except shoot big guns but at least Epps gets some surprising mileage of what is essentially a one dimensional comic relief role.
Beyond these faults there are numerous others. Nemesis is quite frankly an awful monster. Like Jill's costume, his design sits too close to the game for comfort. Perhaps someone should tell Witt that what looks good in the stylised environments of computer game does not always transfer well to the heightened reality of a motion picture and Nemesis is a case in point. He just isn't scary, looking more like the Toxic Avenger than any kind of formidable uber mutant. Witt's direction is also lacking in many areas, particularly in the movie's slower, talkier moments. For scares (the meat and potatoes of any good horror movie, even one as action skewed as this) he relies far too much on cheap jump scares, lurching things unexpectedly into camera with an accompanying blast of audio. Anderson pulled the same trick in the original movie but at least managed to pace it a little better. Here Witt succeeds only in deadening the viewer to it, until even his best attempts don't even elicit so much as a twitch. His experience as a second unit director does shine through in his panache with the movie's visual side however, and he occasionally manages to evoke some surprisingly effective imagery, so long as Nemesis isn't on screen.
Fortunately Apocalypse has two saving graces, it's frenetic pace and capably handled action. The movie is nothing if not action packed and here Witt manages to exceed Anderson's handling of similar sequences in the original while the actors make up for the sleepy performances with some energetic gun and hand-to-hand fighting. Some sequences are really quite enjoyable, most notably the trailer moment of Alice running down a building. At times however, his overly jerky camera work can become distracting, hampering the viewers ability to see what is going on. Compared to movies like the recent Bourne Supremacy, Apocalypse is relatively restrained in this regard however. The movie's adrenaline fueled progress never lets up and also lends it some much needed energy that was otherwise in danger of being sapped away by its leaden dialogue and unoriginal premise.
Above all though, Apocalypse manages to be a decidedly passable action romp through a zombie fueled nightmare city. It may lack Shaun of the Dead's biting humour, or 28 Days Later's horrific imagery, but it does succeed in sweeping the viewer through some fun action sequences and some intermittently pretty photography which in this kind of film is really all that matters.