Schlock classic

Rating: 7/10 (2 January 2005)

I really wasn't expecting this film to be up to much, especially after the godawful atrocity that was the original "Resident Evil". However, there was a glimmer of hope on the horizon (some great preview shots of Sienna Guillory as Jill, and a new director onboard), so I went into this with fairly low expectations, hoping for some fairly enjoyable shlock if nothing else. What was so surprising was how well the film delivered on this and became my favourite "guilty pleasure" movie of 2004.
I won't bore you with another recap of the storyline (it doesn't really matter all that much to be honest, and it's been retreaded a thousand times in other user comments, so check it out there if you must). All you need to know is that is basically tries to shoehorn in the plot of the RE3 game into the foundations set by the end of the first movie, with game stalwarts, Jill, Carlos and Nikolai joining the fray in the fight against the Nemesis and the de rigeur zombie outbreak courtesy of those nice chaps at Umbrella.
Looking at this objectively, it's a fairly low-grade piece of entertainment, but somehow it managed to hit pretty much all the right buttons and leave me exiting the cinema with that "OMFG!" feeling. The opening scenes with the outbreak and the subsequent last-stand of the defense forces was beautifully handled, and matches the feel of the original RE3 intro very well, with some nice tense firefights to start things off. Action sequences as a whole are well-handled, and the film zips along at such a breakneck pace you're seldom left bored. Milla performs fairly well, as does Oded Fehr as Carlos, but the real standout is relative big-screen newcomer Sienna Guillory as Jill, who perfectly personifies the game chara's ass-kicking persona and steals every single scene she's in with ease. From the first thirty seconds she's on screen, you want more of her, and the film doesn't disappoint. I'm a huge fan of the games, and after seeing this film I simply couldn't imagine anyone else in the role.
RE:Apocalypse improves on the original in every way that matters, so much so that I'd recommend you avoid it entirely and skip straight to this (there's a handy recap in the intro anyway). Where the original shied away from the more "adult" nature of the games, this is much more full-blooded, with just the right amount of blood and profanity without descending into overkill. Headshots are back, the zombies are meaner, and it takes a lot more than one pesky licker to put these guys at bay.
Okay, it's not without it's weaknesses either. Towards the end the fight scenes seem to degrade into quickfire editing without any actual content, just blurs of arms and legs at a hundred cuts per second. Also, there's possibly one denouement too many at the end, no spoilers here but let's just say I'd have ended it at the finale of the chopper scene. But these are fairly small concerns, I'd still recommend it heartily to anyone looking for a good night's no-brainer entertainment.