Resident Evil: Ultratumba

Resident Evil: Afterlife attempts to take the series back to basics and delivers a campy action film that has fun with the material. In this chapter Alice searches for Claire and her group of survivors of the zombie apocalypse, which were headed for Alaska looking for the infection free zone Arcadia. Wentworth Miller joins the series and gives a strong performance. Additionally, the over-the-top action scenes are quite impressive, and bring a lot of energy to the film. However, things start to fall apart in the last act as the story goes off in some bizarre directions. Yet for a cheesy horror film, Resident Evil: Afterlife is pretty entertaining.

I liked this compilation of scenes. I liked the soundtrack; I liked the acting; I liked the settings; I liked the effects. As a game, it works greatly. The movie is a sum of chunks of stories. Most of them are action stories. A few are horror stories. Another few are mystery stories. And none of them are connected to each other. They just share common characters.

Honestly, the plot is just an excuse for great action scenes. And I liked the action scenes. I rate it zero for the story, ten for the technical quality. And I have to admit it: in the end, I liked it as a whole.

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.

I'm a huge fan of Milla Jovovich and the Resident Evil movies. The last one - "Resident Evil: Extinction" - I thought was a great movie and the best in the series so far.

So I had to see this latest installment, what a disappointing and mediocre movie it turned out to be. The 3D was so fuzzy and distracting throughout the film but even if it hadn't been in fuzzy 3D it still was badly directed and poorly written, with hardly any of the signature action scenes, and all the actors were very pitiable and amateurish, with an exceptionally lame lead villain. Most of the action was blah and boring, in routine slow mo cuts. Don't go to see this movie if you want good or creative action scenes or an interesting story.

Most of the actors made no impression whatsoever, with the exception of Milla and Wentworth Miller of "Prison Break" fame. And even Wentworth Miller was given little to do, he didn't have but a handful of lines in the movie and it was a waste of his considerable talent. I really hope that he does better movies and roles in the future. I think he could become a major movie star, but not with appearing in crappy movies like this.

I am giving it a generous 5 rating, and that is from a fans perspective. If I wasn't a fan I would give this movie a 3.

Please let the next Resident Evil have a different director than this sub par effort had, and please let it not be in horrifying 3D.

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)