Not very good

Rating: 3/10 (25 January 2008)

So the "Resident Evil"-movies have reached the trilogy-mark. Apparently the first movie trilogy based on a video game. I have to question if this is something admirable or not. The first two movies were mediocre at best, and this third installment is no exception.
First of all the story (if it matters). The world has been completely destroyed by the virus, almost all humans are zombies and the whole ecosystem has failed because of the virus. Basically the world has been turned into one giant desert. In this wasteland a few human survivors roam, among them Alice (Jovovich). Meanwhile The Umbrella Corporation has continued their research.
First of all i can say that this is probably the best-looking of the three movies. The sets are very nice and the world does feel desolate. But mostly the positive comments end there. Like in previous movies, the action scenes are the major problem i have with the movie. I don't understand what's so hard about making decent action scenes. Here we have crappy choreography, boring fights and firefights that look like people are just running around shooting randomly. There is a lot of blood and gore (obviously), but not even that manages to spice things up. I wouldn't go as far as calling the movie boring, but the more quiet moments in the movie are actually the ones that work best. And for an action movie, that's not a very positive remark.
What surprises me most about this movie is that they let Russell Mulcahy direct. There are a few directors in the industry that i wonder why people hire, Mulcahy is definitely one of those. Incidentally, so is the even-worse Paul W.S. Anderson. If you look at Mulcahy's track record, there is very little (if anything) to be impressed of. He has churned out almost exclusively crappy movies. And you can also see that in the last few years he's mostly had to settle for directing TV. Why they would hire him for this movie is impossible to understand. But i guess that it's yet another sign that the bar is not raised very high when making a Resident Evil-movie...
In the end i found this to be about as enjoyable as the first two movies. That is: not very. It's not utter crap, but it's still light years away from better action movies. The problem nowadays is that there are other zombie-movies being made that are so much better than these. "28 Days Later", "Dawn of the Dead" and "28 Weeks Later" for that matter, have raised the bar for the genre. Resident Evil doesn't even try to catch up. Which is kind of sad. I rate this 3/10.