Resident Evil: Extinction

Rating: 6/10 (16 February 2015)

A change of pace for the third film as we move outta urban settings and weapons/laboratory facility type settings for the open desert. Yep Resi Evil goes for the 'Mad Max' look complete with heavily armoured vehicles including the good old petrol tanker, you just can't go wrong with a tanker in your desert based fantasy flick.
The image of Alice being more of a elemental/supernatural type superhero is enforced more in this new film after we learned how badass she was in number two. A motley band of survivors once again are in deep doo doo being attacked by hundreds of ravenous crows (crows in the Mojave desert?), until Alice pops up and saves the day by scorching all the crows to a fiery death with the mind powers she learnt from Professor X.
The plot is just like all the other films, a small group of survivors in a different setting, getting taken down one by one, until only Alice and maybe two others remain for the next sequel (where those two normally get killed off early on). I quite liked the idea of Alice roaming the Southwestern US outback looking for supplies and survivors but stumbling across crazy killers that like to watch people get eaten by zombie dogs. You could totally see that happening in the US with all those religious nut jobs over there, real 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' type folk in the sticks over there.
On the subject of zombie dogs, why are they always rottweilers? what has happened to every other type of dog? is there some kind of special sale on zombie rottweilers?? cos they are everywhere!
Actually this film felt somewhat muted and not as action packed if you can believe that. Looking back over all of the films this one definitely has a slightly slower pace, less interesting characters and less action...apart from the usual mass of gunshots to zombie heads. On the other hand the visuals seem more realistic (deserts always seem to look good on film) and the zombies look good, grittier. The sequence where the main bad scientist guy tries to domesticate a captured zombie harks back to the classic 'Return of the Living Dead' zombie franchise (third film), nice touch.
Despite a more straight tone as it were, this film does suffer from not being quite the ballistic overdrive of action the rest are. It almost doesn't quite fit within the franchise really but I liked the fresh location. The whole film does feel a little bit of an anti climax though, the finale with the mutated creature sums that up pretty well, but as usual the setup for the next sequel intrigues.
6/10