Resident Evil: Afterlife

A prison breakout's always fun, especially if you're on the run, from multi-tongued mutant defiance, or a hooded giant axe wielding giant. Arcadia's moored just off the shore, if you make it there your safe for sure, just try to avoid the shaded fella, who pulls the strings of Umbrella. If your losing faith with all the confusion, you need to prepare for retribution, where everything you've seen before, is repeated, recycled, churned, turned once more.

Alice (the eternal Mila Jovovich) is back and in multiple copies. Her prime target is the Umbrella Corporation and the now T-virus enhanced Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts). After a full frontal attack the Umbrella base is left destroyed, but the whole batch of Alice clones get blown sky-high, when Wesker manages to fly away unscathed and detonate the plant. Conveniently for the movie the original Alice survives unscathed as a castaway on-board the plane. During a skirmish with Wesker Alice gets injected with a antidote, that turns her back to being human (but somehow she still manages to survive a terrible plane crash unharmed and keeps her over-the-top fighting abilities largely intact). With Wesker dead and Umbrella disposed of Alice returns to the States to search of her friends, who left for sanctuary in Alaska, only to disappear in mysterious circumstances.

In general a much improved instalment of the series and if anything the whole series remains enjoyable, if uninventive. In this part Anderson actually outdoes himself and instead of thinking up something original he starts borrowing scenes from other movies. Wesker looks and fights like Neo's twin brother, the new zombies bring to mind "Blade 2", whilst The Executioner has a disturbing familiarity to Pyramid Head of the Silent Hill franchise. Nonetheless some of the scenes are very memorable with the combat with The Executioner a real highlight for the movie (especially given the abrupt ending of the final fight).

There may be a bit too many generic elements with this movie, but that has never stopped the franchise from being mindless slash-em-up fun. Even if a somewhat weakly scripted one. Also Alice remains a very likable heroine, so no matter how bad the script if she gets proper screen time and a couple of intriguing fights, than the movie just never seems to feel like a waste of time.

One of the things I like about the Resident Evil films is that they take the time to fill in the details while holding the audience in suspense.

This forth film completely falls flat on both accounts. Thanks to 2 dimensional characters, an overdone plot, and poor use of foreshadowing, the entire film is predictable. At the same time it doesn't bother to show or explain how certain important plot devices came to be. The movie reeks from it's overuse of Deus ex machina.

The special effects were the only engaging thing about this movie. A lot of it felt like The Matrix in 3D.

One other thing this film did well was continuity from the 3rd film. I like that they didn't spend much time on flashbacks while being faithful to the events of the 3rd film.

All in all my feeling after seeing the movie was that I was expecting more. They could have made it longer, filled in some missing details, developed the plot/characters more, and had a much more enjoyable film.

Plot: As Alice (Milla Jovovich) continues her fight against the nefarious Umbrella Corporation, she meets up with a group of survivors in Los Angeles, who are trying to reach the safe haven known as Arcadia.

So far, here's how the series has done, in my opinion: the first was great, the second was horrible, and the third, though somewhat laughable, was still entertaining. After seeing this one though, I think the series is starting to go downhill again. The movie delivers basically what you could expect: tons of zombie-killing action, some cardboard cutout characters, and a useless story. Afterlife succeeds in all of this.

Aside from the lead performance by Jovovich, I could hardly care less for any of the other actors. One of the unfortunately bad performances actually goes to Wentworth Miller, who played an agonizingly hollow Chris Redfield. And the story needed a complete re-do, because it was almost pointless. One example is the use of the Executioner from the game series. Though I thought his fight with Alice and Claire was cool, I was completely puzzled as to what his purpose in the movie was.

It does do well in the action sequences, including an awesome, though short, standoff on a rooftop. But some of the action is overdrawn thanks to the ridiculously large amount of slow-motion. If they ran the movie without slow-mo, I bet the movie would lose half of its running time. XD I also liked the soundtrack by media boys tomandandy and the film's use of 3D really helped during some of the more intense moments.

Overall it does have its perks and the 3D's good, but this is nothing more than a one-trick pony. Believe me; I'm a big fan of the games, and even I was disappointed.

This fourth Resident Evil instalment was only ever going to be worth seeing if it featured lots of amusing gore and entertaining action scenes that utilised the third dimension successfully. Evidently, director Anderson must've known this too, because nary a second is wasted on anything else. From the get go we're embroiled in a mass raid on Umbrella's high-tech underground headquarters by dozens of Alice replicates. It's Matrix-y slick, features a massive body count and is a great way to kick off proceedings, even if the CGI is occasionally substandard.

The remainder of the film becomes grubbier once it relocates to an abandoned maximum security prison surrounded by thousands of the "infected". Alice, and the ragtag bunch of Los Angeleno's she meets in the jail, encounter blood-thirsty zombies left, right and centre with murderous glee. The finest sequence on offer comes thanks to the inexplicably nonsensical inclusion of an unnamed 10ft creature with a mammoth axe-like weapon, who was apparently only introduced so we could witness its gruesome demise. With rain-drenched slow motion and heart pounding music, watching Alice and Claire despatch of this demented beast is a thrill.

To mention other dispensable elements of this movie – you know, acting, character development, dialogue, plot plausibility, etc – would be redundant for two reasons, (a) because your enjoyment of Afterlife can be measured wholly on your reaction to the above couple of paragraphs and (b) we all know that the aforementioned filmic elements will be close to non-existent anyhow.

Mindless fun.

3 out of 5 (1 - Rubbish, 2 - Ordinary, 3 - Good, 4 - Excellent, 5 - Classic)