Review of Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) by Brian C — 04 May 2014

Chop its head off and burn the body.

This is a terrible adaption of the video game franchise we all know. The action is good which is why I feel charitable giving it one star. Story and characters however are nothing short of abysmal. Umbrella corp, greedy buggers they are, decide to unwisely open up the sealed hive that was close a month ago and predictably get slaughtered and let the virus get free to infect all of raccoon city instead of, ya know, blasting it to kingdom come like any sane person would.

So eventually the infection reaches the city proper and it is quarantined. Here is where things start to get off the rails. Jill Valentine and Carlos Oliviera, two of the characters from the series proper, link up with others to fight off the zombie horde. Just when they are about to face their doom who shows up but little miss Mary Sue herself, Alice! And now unlike the last film she has super powers! Because she simply wasn't overpowered enough from the first film coming out of engagements with nary a hair out of place or smudge on her commando pants. To top it all off she is the only super special snowflake immune to the virus thus sending any sense of actual danger and drama from facing the main weapon of a zombie completely out the window. They literally just become nothing more than shambling row of weeds to mow down with bullets by the bushel, not a tidal wave of bio-hazardous terror that one has to avoid or risk infection.

The rest of the film turns into a rescue mission. Alice and those other less important characters that just so happened to actually be in the source material (but let's face it, they arent nearly as badass as the directors wife super character amirite?) have to rescue the doctor of the scientist who made the virus in the first place and get out of raccoon city before Umbrella drops a nuke that will do to it what they should have done as soon as they realized the experiment went to hell in the first place. This all leads up to a fight with Nemesis (another iconic monster from the videogame) for a climactic duel to the death!

Scratch that. Mary Sue Alice pulls some bullshit about showing him mercy and then he gains his humanity back and the pair slaughters their way through umbrella like they were buddies all along. I'm sorry if you spent the whole movie thinking the big badass zombie monster was the final boss because it isn't. That would have made too much sense for Mr. Anderson. Instead he completely breaks character of one of the series' most terrifying and iconic monsters for a friendly blood soaked friendship romp through the desolate fields of the city.

The dialogue sucks. The action was okay. The faithfulness to the source material is BEYOND crap.

And the main character Alice. Oh dear the main character. What a joke. She has super powers, she turns the scariest monster in the franchise by some power of love bullshit, she completely upstages the characters that were ACTUALLY from the source material, and she is literally there because Paul W S Anderson gets better sex from Milla equally proportioned to how badass Alice looks on screen. Nothing more and nothing less.