Pretty Girls, Big Guns, Ugly Monsters...

Rating: 7/10 (1 April 2005)

The sequel to Resident Evil - in which a group of scientists and special forces get trapped in a giant underground facility overrun with zombies and mutants - is pretty much what you'd expect. After being captured by the Umbrella Corporation at the end of the first film, almost-sole-survivor Milla Jovovich (the only supermodel in the world who you can take seriously as an action heroine) wakes up in an abandoned laboratory in Raccoon City to find that the zombie-animating "t-virus" has spread to the surface. Half the city are already zombified and killing the other half, and Umbrella Corporation has sealed off the city limits and is planning to "sanitise" the area. Hooking up with a rag-tag group of survivors, Jovovich makes a deal with a rogue Umbrella scientist who promises to get them out of town as long as they rescue his missing daughter who's hiding somewhere in the ruins. Meanwhile Umbrella has its own plans for the lovely Miss Milla, involving a seven-foot armour-clad mutant called the Nemesis who's using the infested city as a training ground. Much shooting/fighting/exploding ensues, and - just like in the first film - the mysterious cliffhanger ending leaves things wide open for another sequel.
Probably because it's based on a Japanese video game, this movie isn't afraid to embrace the clichés that Hollywood's spent the last decade or so trying to avoid. Lurching zombies, machine gun-toting monsters, smarmy suit-wearing villains, hard-as-nails soldiers and a wisecracking streetwise black dude are all essential ingredients, as well as not one but TWO sexy ass-kicking heroines. While Jovovich rides in to save the day on a motorcycle and carries so many guns it's a wonder she doesn't fall over, Sienna Guillory (as tough bitch cop Jill Valentine) has the dubious honour of performing various athletic action sequences in a miniskirt and boob tube. Am I complaining? Hell no.
To be honest, it's really quite refreshing to see a movie like this in this day and age. Like the timelessly cheesy horror/action flicks of John Carpenter, the Resident Evil franchise throws realism and political correctness to the wind and just has fun pitting Pretty Girls With Big Guns against Ugly Monsters With Big Teeth. Be honest - unless you're a metrosexual poseur or a card-carrying member of the PC Police, you probably love this stuff as much as I do.