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#486 - Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Alexander Witt, 2004
A genetically engineered virus that turns people into zombies is unleashed on a city.
I have seen bits and pieces of various Resident Evil films in the past while also playing only one game in the series to completion (Resident Evil 4, for the record). While you'd think that I would have gotten enough of an idea of what such a film would've been like from those snippets, apparently that wasn't enough and, when Resident Evil: Apocalypse aired on TV recently, I decided to actually give the whole thing a shot. In hindsight, I probably should have given it a few shots to make sure it stayed down. It's not like I didn't expect this to be a horrific piece of work (and not really in the way that the filmmakers intended), but it either didn't live up to my expectations or surpassed them. I'm really not sure. Apocalypse follows on from the events of the first film by having the zombie virus that was originally contained in a secret laboratory break out and infect the population of the fictional Raccoon City. The series brings back Milla Jovovich as the film series' protagonist, a genetically engineered super-soldier who is unleashed on the city because of...reasons that don't actually make sense in the face of later narrative revelations. She eventually joins up with a handful of survivors, who are then tasked with finding the young daughter of a scientist (Jared Harris) who has betrayed the evil corporation in order to rescue her.
Even for an inherently silly action-horror movie, the film definitely doesn't seem to care about whether or not it respects its audience's intelligence. A scene takes place in the morning, then a title card that reads "13 hours later..." appears before cutting to...an establishing shot that takes place in broad daylight. They just didn't care. The same applies to the characterisation, which is pretty weak or nonsensical - Jovovich plays a boring invincible heroine whose only real development comes from her history with a person who also ends up being turned into a genetically engineered super-soldier, while other characters play into a variety of stereotypes such as a loose-cannon cop, a self-serving journalist, sympathetic employees of the evil corporation going rogue, etc. It gets to the point where you are barely given any reason to care about their survival beyond the fact that they are the only humans in a zombie movie that aren't straight-up villains. The worst one of all is easily Mike Epps as a civilian who gets caught up in the fracas with his first appearance involving him being handcuffed to a zombie at a police station. Though he is clearly intended to be comic relief thanks to his general ineptitude and sheer dumb luck (such as surviving the evil super-soldier mini-gunning a building to pieces around him), his presence is neither comic nor a relief. There is literally a scene where he drives down a road and yells out, "G-T-A, mother****er!" as he runs down a zombie. They just didn't care.
On the action and horror fronts, things are not just underwhelming, they're downright irritating. Jump-scares are set up on the flimsiest and least sensible pretenses possible, the many scenes of zombies and other infected creatures being gunned down or blown up look ridiculous, and the film never builds up a sufficient atmosphere of dread because it's relying on clichés half the time (there are at least two instances of characters calling out to unresponsive humans who have their backs turned before approaching them anyway...) The hyped-up technical approach does little to generate any excitement; the extremely fast editing in some sections is more likely to bring on a headache. At least it's a point in the film's favour that the main villain is rendered somewhat competently through practical effects. Even for a film that wants nothing more than to deliver about ninety minutes of zombie thrills, Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a major disappointment that gets a couple of technical aspects right but also gets most of them wrong, and that's without getting into the problems that plague the plot, action, and characters. Might be good for some incredulous entertainment, but if that's not your thing then avoid this.
Alexander Witt, 2004
A genetically engineered virus that turns people into zombies is unleashed on a city.
I have seen bits and pieces of various Resident Evil films in the past while also playing only one game in the series to completion (Resident Evil 4, for the record). While you'd think that I would have gotten enough of an idea of what such a film would've been like from those snippets, apparently that wasn't enough and, when Resident Evil: Apocalypse aired on TV recently, I decided to actually give the whole thing a shot. In hindsight, I probably should have given it a few shots to make sure it stayed down. It's not like I didn't expect this to be a horrific piece of work (and not really in the way that the filmmakers intended), but it either didn't live up to my expectations or surpassed them. I'm really not sure. Apocalypse follows on from the events of the first film by having the zombie virus that was originally contained in a secret laboratory break out and infect the population of the fictional Raccoon City. The series brings back Milla Jovovich as the film series' protagonist, a genetically engineered super-soldier who is unleashed on the city because of...reasons that don't actually make sense in the face of later narrative revelations. She eventually joins up with a handful of survivors, who are then tasked with finding the young daughter of a scientist (Jared Harris) who has betrayed the evil corporation in order to rescue her.
Even for an inherently silly action-horror movie, the film definitely doesn't seem to care about whether or not it respects its audience's intelligence. A scene takes place in the morning, then a title card that reads "13 hours later..." appears before cutting to...an establishing shot that takes place in broad daylight. They just didn't care. The same applies to the characterisation, which is pretty weak or nonsensical - Jovovich plays a boring invincible heroine whose only real development comes from her history with a person who also ends up being turned into a genetically engineered super-soldier, while other characters play into a variety of stereotypes such as a loose-cannon cop, a self-serving journalist, sympathetic employees of the evil corporation going rogue, etc. It gets to the point where you are barely given any reason to care about their survival beyond the fact that they are the only humans in a zombie movie that aren't straight-up villains. The worst one of all is easily Mike Epps as a civilian who gets caught up in the fracas with his first appearance involving him being handcuffed to a zombie at a police station. Though he is clearly intended to be comic relief thanks to his general ineptitude and sheer dumb luck (such as surviving the evil super-soldier mini-gunning a building to pieces around him), his presence is neither comic nor a relief. There is literally a scene where he drives down a road and yells out, "G-T-A, mother****er!" as he runs down a zombie. They just didn't care.
On the action and horror fronts, things are not just underwhelming, they're downright irritating. Jump-scares are set up on the flimsiest and least sensible pretenses possible, the many scenes of zombies and other infected creatures being gunned down or blown up look ridiculous, and the film never builds up a sufficient atmosphere of dread because it's relying on clichés half the time (there are at least two instances of characters calling out to unresponsive humans who have their backs turned before approaching them anyway...) The hyped-up technical approach does little to generate any excitement; the extremely fast editing in some sections is more likely to bring on a headache. At least it's a point in the film's favour that the main villain is rendered somewhat competently through practical effects. Even for a film that wants nothing more than to deliver about ninety minutes of zombie thrills, Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a major disappointment that gets a couple of technical aspects right but also gets most of them wrong, and that's without getting into the problems that plague the plot, action, and characters. Might be good for some incredulous entertainment, but if that's not your thing then avoid this.