entertaining but very average

Rating: 5/10 (1 October 2007)

Is it good or bad things that always come in threes? It seems that in Hollywood these days, it doesn't really matter. So, after a decent zombie action movie and a terrible zombie/video game movie, we find ourselves with Resident Evil: Extinction.
It picks up where 2 left off. The virus has spread, lots of people are mostly dead, and the remains of humanity find themselves travelling the open roads or holed up underground. Think Day of the Dead crossed with Mad Max, and you'll have an idea of the tone the movie's trying to set.
The downfall of 2 was that it tried to be too much like the game, and 3 appears to have learnt from these mistakes. While there are lots of cute little nods to the source material, in the form of character names, little piano pieces, and claustrophobic corridors, the movie moves toward the standard zombie formula pretty quickly rather than going with the single character setup, although it does take a while for Milla to find another little gang of survivors and form our ragtag crew of zombie fodder; I guess the writers knew there really wasn't much material to work over in that respect.
Meanwhile, there is the same sort of clichéd corporate menace from Umbrella, with their serums and their cloning (yes, cloning, in a zombie movie, obviously a great idea) and their plans to turn the zombies into a free workforce (another stellar plan). It's a subplot quite obviously lifted from Day of the Dead, but it just feels a bit redundant, although I suppose it does give you someone to boo and hiss at when they appear on screen. You know, as if the zombie hordes weren't menace enough. Having said that, some of the zombies look a bit...weak. I understand that there are fewer and fewer people milling about waiting to be eaten, but a lot of them just look thin and plastic, which isn't *really* all that menacing.
Otherwise, Extinction features the same general ass-kickery from Milla, big action scenes, and mostly inept support from random stock characters. While Milla knows how to play this role, as do the other returning characters, but pretty much everybody else is just...bad. Check out the hospital scene near the start or the bit where that scientist guy "domesticates" a zombie for a host of examples of bad acting; these are definitely not thespians at the top of their game. Oh, and for more amateur points, don't forget that generic nu-metal soundtrack!
While it isn't great, or even good, it's okay, providing a reasonable amount of silly cliché-ridden entertainment thanks to its unashamed lifting of material from every zombie movie ever and attempts to come up with new and exciting ideas (clones! zombie birds!), but really it adds nothing new, and will hopefully mark the end of a relatively unsuccessful franchise, despite its somewhat open ending.