Not much good going on

Rating: 2/10 (26 September 2007)

Films adapted from video games generally have received flak mainly for their inability to cater to a larger audience than a specified niche among the audience - mainly teenage boys who spend their free time in front of, eh, video games. It's always a case of you either you like it or you don't.
Having said that, I enjoyed the first "Resident Evil" (I was 17 then) and marginally liked "Resident Evil: Apocalypse" (I was 19): partly because I was someone who has had an on-off affair with role-playing games (RPGs), specifically with the PS2 console; but mostly because I understood that these kind of movies required no life-affirming morales, no intricate plot, no credible science to provide mental calisthenics. Just pure popcorn entertainment and an unabashed sense of escapism for them to work. Considering these aspects, it's not much to ask.
But then comes "Resident Evil: Extinction", a third-tier installment (apparently the year of thirds hasn't ended yet) that's so painfully unexciting, it's not just comparable to having to watch someone else play the game; it's like having to watch someone play the game using a walkthrough downloaded from some gaming forum. Everything's too perfunctory and the scare factor is conspicuously several notches lower.
Here, Milla Jovovich returns as zombie butt-whooping Alice, five years after the first film, when the Umbrella Corporation's T-Virus has escaped Racoon City and has set humankind into the brink of extinction. Together with a band of survivors that includes a sleepwalking cast of Ali Larter, Ashanti, Oded Fehr and, pity, Spencer Locke, they cross the desert to get to Alaska, which may be their final frontier.
Writer Paul W.S. Anderson and director Russell Mulcahy doesn't provide the story with any interesting characters and their treatment of the material is so half-hearted you barely feel the plot as it advances from one point to another. Jovovich still provides a solid central figure but her ho-hum action scenes can't make up for an overall lackluster film.
But really, when you're a 20-something male and the best thing you can find about a zombie movie is teen actress Spencer Locke, then there's really not much good going on.