Sep
17
“Resident Evil: Afterlife” Review
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Ladies and gentlemen, Paul W.S. Anderson brings you the world’s most boring movie in three dimensions! Holy hell, is this movie a slog. I’ve sat through more relentlessly-paced PowerPoint presentations. I expected very, very little from this film and it somehow failed to even deliver against those expectations.
Milla Jovovich returns to the role that made her Mrs. Paul W.S. Anderson, a kung-fu fighting, telekinetic zombie hunter named Alice. At the beginning of the film, Alice and a dozen or so of her clones raid one of the evil Umbrella Corporation’s byzantine subterranean strongholds. Then she gets stabbed in the neck with a hypodermic needle by Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts, doing the world’s worst Hugo Weaving impression) and injected with a serum that takes away all of her kung-fu fighting and telekinetic powers — derp!
Six months later, Alice travels to a place called Arcadia — somewhere in Alaska — thinking she’ll find the last vestiges of human civilization there, but clearly, she’s looking in the wrong damn state. In Arcadia she finds nothing but abandoned aircraft and a filthy-dirty and half-psychotic Claire Redfield (Ali Larter). They split from Alaska in an airplane, travel down the West Coast and happen upon a few survivors living in a prison that’s apparently smack in the middle of Downtown Los Angeles. Alice soon realizes that Arcadia isn’t a place, but a ship, one that’s anchored just off the Southern California coast. Trouble is, thousands of the world’s least menacing zombies are massed right outside the prison walls.
What follows is deadly dull. They hem and haw in the prison for what seems like 25 years to life, debating whether or not to trust the only remaining inmate, Chris (Wentworth Miller), who claims know how they can get out of there. Then some zombies with four-pronged tongues burrow inside, kill the hottest chick in the group, and the remaining survivors become desperate to get out. And some burly, twelve-foot-tall executioner-looking guy with spikes rammed into him also shows up, apropos of nothing, and gets into a scrap with Alice and Claire in the shower.
Nothing in this movie is causally-linked. When people complain that a certain movie has no plot, they’re actually complaining about how the sequence of events that make up a film — the plot itself — do not motivate one another, making everything feel random and arbitrary. That’s this movie all over. Stuff happens (slowly but surely) in this movie, but it’s all coincidental. You can get away with coincidence by setting up things in the first act that will pay off later. Otherwise, shit feels random and arbitrary. I mean, Chris and Claire and brother and sister. Imagine that. Claire just happened to land in the one place where her brother’s been incarcerated for who knows how long. And that’s not the worst coincidence in the whole damn movie!
Now, one might say, “But, Brad, it’s just a ‘Resident Evil’ movie. What did you expect?” It’s that kind of thinking that produces such weak sauce z-grade schlock these days. If you’re going to make a “Resident Evil” movie, why not make the best “Resident Evil” movie possible? Paul W.S. Anderson, as either a writer or a writer-director on these films, has struck out FOUR times now. Statistically, he can’t even accidentally churn out something worthwhile. It’s like he’s actively trying to invent a cure for insomnia.
I dunno. A Perfect Circle deserves better. And so do fans of the games.
-Brad Lohan
Sep
9
Dolph Lundgren, my personal favorite of Grace Jones’ ex-boyfriends, is the first of hopefully several fading action stars to benefit from the success of “The Expendables.” His recent film, “The Killing Machine” (aka “Icarus”), is getting a theatrical run on the art house circuit. Where else?
My VHS collection is teeming with Dolph Lundgren titles: “I Come in Peace,” “The Punisher,” uh…okay, maybe not teeming. But still. “I Come in Peace” in particular is a brilliant genre effort in which Mr. Lundgren plays a roundhouse-kicking police detective and wine connoisseur on the trail of a seven-foot-tall intergalactic drug smuggler. And there’s a gang of Yuppies with Uzis who call themselves the White Boys. Why this movie is not available on DVD is beyond human comprehension.
Last year, I attended the 3/5ths of the Dolph Lundgren Film Festival at the New Bev. Watching “Rocky IV” with an audience is, well, probably the only way I could’ve survived “Rocky IV.” And yet, until “The Expendables,” it was the only way to see Mr. Lundgren on a screen larger than my television.
Not anymore! Now, I can see “The Killing Machine,” which Lundgren also directed, at the Sunset 5 in West Hollywood. A new day is upon us.
-Brad Lohan