Review of Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) by Shiira — 12 Sep 2010

Does Milla Jovovich still write songs? Arguably, the Ukranian-born Jovovich is the Harper Lee of supermodels-cum-songwriters. Nobody told her that supermodels were supposed to be dumb; they don't release albums as startlingly accomplished as "The Divine Comedy".

Filmmaker Richard Linklater must have sensed that music was Jovovich's true calling when he cast her as a folksinger in "Dazed and Confused", where the composer of the Kate Bush-inspired "Gentleman Who Fell"(the former Vogue cover girl captures Bush's flair for the theatrical with a playful deftness) can be glimpsed strumming a blue guitar in the company of stoners.

Released in 1994, "The Divine Comedy" holds up, made all the more astonishing since Jovovich was only nineteen at the time. In a sense, she invented Fiona Apple. As an actress, she also played everybody's favorite fifteenth-century heretic in Luc Besson's "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc", in which her performance as The Maid of Orleans fell somewhere between Ingrid Bergman and Jane Wiedlin.

To put it tactfully, Jovovich could have used more seasoning, but she wasn't awful on the scale of Sofia Coppola in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather III"; she deserved a second chance at a project that called for more than a pretty face and tight physique.

But Hollywood can be unforgiving to actresses who bomb in their first starring role(witness Brittany Murphy's descent after Nick Hurran's "Little Black Book"), so once again, she's "Alice in Video Gameland", playing a woman with a pretty face and tight physique in "Resident Evil: Afterlife", her fourth(fifth, if you count Kurt Wimmer's "Ultraviolet") go-around as deadly eye-candy, with the added plus of being deadly eye-candy in 3D.

(Admittedly, the film works on the level of spectacle: the 3D is first-rate.) Jovovich, however, is too smart for her prevailing demographic group. (The music video for "Gentleman Who Fell" references avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren's "Meshes in the Afternoon", for Pete's sake.

) Unfortunately, whereas Apple was romantically involved with Paul Thomas Anderson, the once-promising singer-songwriter ended up with the other Paul Anderson. Jovovich's pairing with her filmmaker/husband on the "Resident Evil" series recalls Geena Davis' work with ex-hubby Renny Harlin("Cutthroat Island", "The Long Kiss Goodnight") in that the action-oriented films ruined Davis' cachet as an adept dramatic actress.

"To Kill a Dogwalker", indeed. With a break or two, maybe Jovovich could've had Famke Janssen's career. As she proved in David Twohy's "A Perfect Getaway"(a vastly underrated movie about duplicitous honeymooners on holiday in Hawaii), the beautiful Versace girl does indeed have an acting range than extends beyond steely resolve, in which she more than held her own with Steve Zahn, showing at long last, the opportunity to do more than shoot guns in skin-tight outfits.