I gotta shotgun

Rating: 6/10 (18 December 2009)

Whereas it is easy to sympathise with Alien, Terminator, Matrix (etc.) fan boys for feeling shortchanged and insulted as they watched their beloved franchises complete the circle from B-movies masquerading as A-movies to ending up as D-movies, I'll never understand the Resident Evil crowd's objection to these flicks. The original video games were not brain food with lines like "Jill sandwich" and "you, the 'Master of Unlocking'" delivered by the most stilted voice actors heard since the Zelda CD-I games. Also, considering Romero and Co. have botched the simple concept of the zombie genre, it's fun to just escape into the post-apocalyptic fantasy land where slow moving flesh-eaters 'live' again.
It helps that I never enjoyed the entirety of Mad Max, Alien Resurrection, The Matrix, Land of The Dead and any number of other movies this steals from. And that they only chose to steal the good stuff and trim away all the talky bits. So instead of all that cod philosophy horsesh*t and exposition meetings with the Yoda Oracle that bore you to tears, you get Milla Jovovovovavich able to bend time and space until Umbrella turn off her power switch. Simple.
The film starts off with a clone Milla biting the dust: 'Evil corporation constantly cloning until they find the perfect specimen' cribbed from Alien 4. Steal from the best, I guess. This was cool. A concept so illogical that it pulls you into the fantasy. Cut to a Mad Max rip off of a truck or bus or whateverdafu*k pimped out in faux-Megaweapon armor dicing the head of a zombie as the kids aboard Dead Reckoning cheer. This was also cool... just because. Some other stuff happens like that annoying comic-relief character from the second movie getting bitten and Milla acting a more likable lead for once. Both very cool. Come to think of it, this movie is perfect at quickly dispensing with secondary characters you had just assumed would become permanent fixtures. "Mar, I don't like her... oh cool she's enveloped by crows!" it took him two movies to get there, but Paul Anderson now knows that people don't want to be annoyed by those on screen.
Although this movie lacks fundamentals like a fortified mall or a Tenpenny Tower safe zone, a Milla ginger muff shot, and a scene of a drunk sniper in a cowboy hat taking gleeful potshots of ambling zombies fueling every ten-year-old boy's dream lifestyle (they used up all three by the second pic), it does have Super Milla64. An indestructible super badass who's super motorcycle boots drove me to cross dressing with super envy. All the wire work in the climatic super duper zombie showdown in a very sandy Las Vegas elicited the same "woah!" from me as when I first saw Ted Theodore Logan bouncing off the pillars wasting regenerating video game enemies with unlimited ammo. And that's kinda the point.