Resident Evil's 'Afterlife' better than 'Extinction', but lacks dimension
Following horror franchises is a lot like following Seattle sports teams.
The screen is filled with shambling, uncoordinated monsters. You'reovercome by the deep-seated dread of the terror to come. Is anyonegoing to make it out of there alive? Not likely. In fact, there'sabout an 85% chance Franklin Gutierrez will be sliced in half andhe'll look down at himself and be all "Oh no" as his torso slidesgooily away from his hips.
But mostly, you end up questioning your priorities. Yes, there wasthat one great movie or season a while back, but haven't the last twoor three sucked like a vacuum (in case that's over your head, vacuumsare proverbial for sucking)? The Resident Evil series hasn'tquite gone that way — while the second one wasn't too shabby, none ofthem are franchise-supporting classics — but after Resident Evil:Afterlife, you can at least say it's consistent.
-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.
Milla Jovovich and her psychic clone army are continuing their assaultagainst the Umbrella Corporation, whose killer T-virus has reducedhumanity to slavering zombies. In the attack, Umbrella operative ShawnRoberts injects Jovovich with a serum that strips her of hersuperpowers.
Newly human, she flies in search of Arcadia, a city of survivors.After a false lead, she ends up stranded with a handful of survivorsin an LA prison — and thousands of zombies stand between them andescape.
Though I have a certain fondness for the first two entries in theResident Evil franchise, the last entry, Extinction,made me wish it were an autobiographical account from the writer anddirector. It raised numerous questions, among them "How does a viruslet you shoot mind bullets?" or "Just how much magic is Jovovich capableof?" And ultimately, "Could this possibly get sillier without dressing all thezombies in party hats?"
So it's a nice dodge to just throw all that nonsense out the windowand get back to basics: oh damn, zombies everywhere. Of course, italso renders the last movie even more pointless. But if you've got twobabies and no baby food and one of the babies only has one eye, well,you know who's ending up in whose spoon.
Back to basics for Afterlife, then: Matrix-like visuals(only, you know, not The Matrix), half-baked internalmythology, and thin character development. Yet writer/director PaulW.S. Anderson (who wrote the entire series and directed the first, incase any of you nerds have strong opinions on which is the best)handles the action well and tells a cohesive story along with it.
Admittedly, hailing a movie for the titanic accomplishment of "makingsense" may be such faint praise you can't hear it over the neighborsarguing over who has to bail their daughter out this time. And youknow what, now that I think about it, you're right.
Afterlife is fun enough in the moment, but there's a constantsense it's missing a dimension. Wentworth Miller shows up as an inmatewho may or may not be a Hannibal Lecter-esque killer, then...nothing.It's as dramatic as a nap. Likewise with its unfocused jabs atHollywood; most of the survivors are industry types, but throughAfterlife's diamond-edged insight, that just means theproducer-guy is not to be trusted and the chick has a real big rack.And what's with that guy with the hammer??
Points for trying. Points for being better than Extinction. Andsuper-extra bonus points for Jovovich's sweet blunderbuss.Afterlife is a good-looking film with no obnoxiousness to it,it's just never anything more than a run-of-the-mill zombie flick.
Grade: C
This story was originally published September 13, 2010 at 5:08 AM with the headline "Resident Evil's 'Afterlife' better than 'Extinction', but lacks dimension."