Movie: “Resident Evil: Extinction”
Tagline:
“Experimentation…Evolution…Extinction”
“All Bets Are Off”
Rating: R for strong horror violence
Release: September 21
Running Time: 1 hr 35 min
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Oded Fehr, Mike Epps, Iain Glen, Ashanti Douglas, Chris Egan, and Spencer Locke… IMDB listing
Verdict: It’s everything that’s wrong with Hollywood, but, God help me, the only way I could love the ninety minute killing sprees that are the Resident Evil franchise more is if they somehow managed to remove the five minutes of plot that interrupt all the noise. I won’t buy the DVD, but I enjoy seeing it on the big screen and I will most likely spend untold hours vegging out in front of the television watching it when it hits cable.
Synopsis:
Years after the events of the previous movie, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, which chronicles the destruction of Raccoon City, Alice wanders the deserts that are all that is left of the world’s ecosystems. After a complete non sequitur in which she must kill the obligatory back wood family that inevitably crop up during the course of apocalypses, Alice is force to rejoin her fellow Raccoon survivors Carlos Olivera and L.J. on a convoy in desperate need of fuel. Determined to travel to Alaska, the convoy decides that the only way to secure enough fuel is by finding a gas station in a Las Vega that has nearly been lost to the sands of a shifting dessert. When one of the few remaining scientists of the Umbrella Corporation decides to intervene in order to capture Alice, the real action begins.
Review:
I want to hate this film franchise, but I just can’t. Like the third scoop of ice cream you know you’re going to regret even as you order it, Apocalypse is ninety minutes of mindless action that will keep you on the edge of the seat and have you denying that you paid to see it in the morning. While I have little doubt that this film will garner nothing but sarcasm and scorn among reviewers who aren’t self-claimed fan bois, in my own opinion, this movie is the very embodiment of the Resident Evil video game franchise, which is all it claims to be after all.
To fans of the series and games, I think that you’ll have your ticket in hand before you find the time to read my review, but, for what it’s worth, the third installment in the Resident Evil won’t be a disappointment. The body count is higher, the jolts are just as frequent, and the combat is just as improbably stupendous as ever. Better, the plot (what little there is) advances the franchise’s storyline rather than rehashing the events of the earlier two installments.
Rather than flogging the horrors of the slow spread of the Zombie-creating virus, the film deals with the efforts of the few remaining survivors to escape the horrors of life in the desert, and it does so by drawing quite innovatively on the successes of it’s cinematic fore-bearers. In a scene reminiscent of Hitchcock’s The Birds, Alice’s caravan is beset by crazed birds. In another scene reminiscent of Romero’s Day of the Dead, the Umbrella Corporation’s scientists make an attempt to domesticate the Zombies in an underground bunker. The parade of “homages” continues throughout the film, resulting in a exciting, literarily unoriginal film that will have film snobs turning up their noses in public and sneaking into the back rows of theaters to watch.
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