I Come To You With A Warning

Rating: Null/10 (23 September 2004)

Saw Resident Evil 2. Without going into FULL detail, allow me to say this:
What a LOAD!
Tell you what, if you liked the first movie, then watch this only if you want an excuse to create a big budget, blow-every-flipping-thing-up, bridge to another possible sequel.
I swear, Paul Anderson is films version of Piers Anthony (sp?). He doesn't know how to end a movie, so he stops them all on some freaking Joss Weadon cliffhanger.
Y'know Paul, sometimes we WANT endings to our films. We want to be able to have that last sigh of relief when a film ends. We want to feel like something is concluded. We DON'T all want to be left hanging at the end of everyone of your films. Every once and a while is fine, but not EVERY movie. That kind of crap makes me wary of wanting to see the future releases of Driver and Necropolis. Heck, if he WANTED a cliffhanger, he could have stopped the movie 5 minutes from where it did end and I would have been less irritated.
The ending isn't the only fault of this Summer ending fluff. Mila Jovavich was the best actor of the film. Now, while I'm not down playing her growing talent, look at this closer. When your highest-grade actor is an ex-super model, something is wrong. Most of the other actors had some kind of Van Damme ascent and made it hard to understand them alone. The others padded their sub par acting with guns blazing at things (most which weren't zombies, more on that later) or a blazing flurry of F-Words.
It is with that word and the pointless topless scenes that I think garnered the "R" rating, which is pretty flipping sad.
All the characters were stale and you began to not really care if one guy lived or died. When the characters did die, there wasn't ever that feeling of "Aw, man, I really liked him/her too".
Now, I KNOW the Resident Evil series isn't all about zombies. It's not a plain zombie story, sure, but they sure as hell have a lot to do with it. It played a lot into the first movie. THEY were it. THEY were the baddies, while sharing the light with the ONE Licker and the amnesia filled dude with the attitude.
The zombies this round are filler in the film. The movie just seems to flash back at them, as if to say "Oh yeah, they're here too". The Licker was even downplayed as a minimal threat to the people who had guns. In the first, it ransacked everything in sight and began evolving and becoming badder. This time, there's like TEN of them. You're thinking, "Holy crap, they're screwed".
Not necessarily so, Lois.
Instead, one guy gets offed and the rest are either shot, run over, blowed up or Crushed By Christ(TM).
Naturally, our heroes trip into a graveyard all filled with fog (that only seems to be THERE) and one of our "Zombie Reminders" shine as a bunch of dudes pop from the ground and start dancing around with Michael Jackson to bring in the long awaited Thriller 2: Zombie Boogaloo.
Okay, maybe not, but it would make more sense as to why they arrived than the NON reason the movie gave.
Then there's Nemesis. Ah, Nemesis. One of the biggest Baddies of them all. He was mysterious, he was tough, he wore black and he whooped your butt. Now, though, he was more like Frankenstein with a gun. He just kind of lumbered around Raccoon City, making himself known and doing very little. Then there's this hand-to-hand fight he was with Alice that's the equivalent of Nancy Fowler Archer, of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman fame, battling the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man. They just shuffled about and twitched at each other. I couldn't tell what was going on half the time cause of Paul's EXTREME close-ups, which were, more than likely, hiding the characters physical flaws.
All of this combined makes me want to se the possibility of a three as much as I want to fork over 7.50 to see a third Star Wars.
Very Little.