Highly impressive sequel effort

Rating: 9/10 (17 April 2015)

As the T-virus circles the globe, Alive joins a caravan of survivors trekking across the American landscape hoping for salvation against the never-ending hordes of undead and mutants on their trail.
Overall this is one of the better efforts for the franchise. One of the better parts here is the rather high-quantity action throughout here which gives this one an incredibly fast pace that makes this one really enjoyable. Some of the big action scenes, like the battle with the mutated dogs in the pit or a later scene in the underground complex are all about giving it some impressive gore while others figure to be more based on spectacle and action. This is mostly covered by the two big scenes in this which really give off plenty to like about it, the assault by the numerous birds on the bus campground and the battle with the zombies at the casino grounds which provide this one with plenty of dynamic and impressive actions as the spectacular image of the birds flying into and swarming the buses before being burned up by the flamethrower while later scenes of the horde of creatures battling in the sand-covered dunes of the casino grounds provides this with a large quantity of action and some decent gore. Likewise, the big mutant scores really well with a rather thrilling and ingenious battle that really makes for a fun battle as the back-and-forth nature of the brawl comes to an appropriate end, dealing nicely with the early scene of the creepy run-through of the house alone which results in one of the creepiest and most surprising twists at the end of this which gives it a rather creepy air to go along with those action scenes. That tends to be its good points and are more than enough to hold off the few flaws. The fact that the film really tends to feature a lot of rather useless scenes to pad time out and hammer home what we already know by in the series. We already know Alice is handy with guns and weaponry, so the tedious scene of her confronting the family in the desert trap makes no sense as to be included beyond the gore, and scenes of the facility testing the attempts to control the virus and mutations is nothing new that we haven't seen already as we know they're devious and underhanded. That's in addition to the rather obvious CGI which pops up here for the scenes of the creatures' appearing en-masse, the more extreme gore scenes and the more spectacular action scenes that are quite obvious in their execution. It's all that really holds this one down.
Rated R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.