It was SO not better than the first!

Rating: 4/10 (11 September 2004)

Just saw RE: Apocalypse today. I don't play the game and I'm not a particular fan of zombie flicks - I watched it to see Milla Jovovich. She looked incredible in the first RE film. This sequel was, in most cases, a big disappointment. Yes, the story structure was better than in the first movie, but essentially just as insubstantial, if not more so. This is mindless action, with scenes incredibly quickly cut in order to disguise the lack of both real choreographic ability and good-looking martial arts moves. Jill Valentine was a bad Lara Croft imitation (complete with the blue-green top piece), whose only function was to be upstaged by Alice. This is a really bad movie, a major reason for which being that it was wildly underlit, so we couldn't really see what was going on - a flaw that many bad low-budget and over-commercial movies have. More seriously, we couldn't see Milla's face very well. *Sigh!* Now THAT's a crime!
There were one or two cool scenes in the movie, but that doesn't do much to redeem it. This movie gets from me a rating of 4 out of 10.
Incidentally, one of the cool scenes is at the end, when Milla looks into the surveillance camera wearing that crimson lipstick... Whoa! In fact, what this movie mainly failed to do, IMO, was to feature Milla's face more prominently. It should have built its entire shooting style around that great face, as, to an extent, the first movie actually did.