| Resident Evil | 
Rated: R
Review: 3
Showing @:
Celebration Cinemas
Sun-Thurs- 9:50
Fri-Sat- 9:50, 11:40
"Resident Evil" is so bad it can't even steal effectively from far better movies.
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By David Germain
Associated Press The makers of "Resident Evil" slipped some "Alice in Wonderland" homages into their big-screen version of the video game. As you ponder why anyone would want to draw comparisons between Lewis Carroll's beloved work of nonsensical fantasy and a horror flick about flesh-munching zombies, keep in mind that the real wonder is why anyone would want to make this movie at all. Sure, it's based on an enormously popular series of games. But haven't we had enough joyless joystick adaptations to make the video-game movie as passe a relic as Space Invaders or Pac-Man? "Resident Evil" is an excessively derivative blend of "Aliens" and "Night of the Living Dead," with traces of Stephen King's "The Stand" tossed in. The movie swipes ideas and visuals from better films, swirling them into an unimaginative concoction with little of its own to offer. Writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson ("Mortal Kombat") patterns "Resident Evil" as a prequel to the video games, explaining how such characters as the Undead, the Zombie Dogs and the mutant, long-tongued Licker came to be. In some near future, the Umbrella Corp. dominates the corporate landscape, conducting secret genetic and viral research in an underground bunker called the Hive. When a virus is released, the complex is sealed off and the compound's 500 workers are killed. A group of commandos is dispatched to Looking Glass House (Lewis Carroll reference No. 1), a mansion concealing the Hive entrance, to journey below ground and find out what happened. They pick up a couple of amnesiacs found at the gateway, including Milla Jovovich as Alice (Lewis Carroll reference No. 2). The movie is incomprehensible in the opening minutes, the cinematic equivalent of trying to play a complicated video game without a clue about the rules. Then, like an on-screen video-game intro explaining how the game goes, one of the soldiers conveniently lays out the setup to Alice: She and the other amnesiac are Hive entrance guards, zapped by a memory-draining weapon. The commandos must journey down through various perils to reach the computer that controls the Hive, the Red Queen (Lewis Carroll reference No. 3). From there the film plays out in the linear fashion of a video game, the soldiers advancing to new levels with tougher tasks and obstacles, including Hive workers reanimated into brainless zombies that need to feed on living humans; undead dogs; the Red Queen's high-tech defenses; and the ravenous Licker. As Alice's memories slowly return, her flashbacks also spell out a human menace endangering the troops. "Aliens" did the soldiers-against-creatures thing far better than "Resident Evil." And the movie's undead hordes are shameless ripoffs of George Romero's "Living Dead" flicks, right down to their herky-jerky means of ambulating. For titillation's sake, Jovovich runs around clad in next to nothing at the beginning and end of the film. She has a decent action- hero presence that goes to waste in the movie's miasma of silly stunts, drab dialogue, Nintendo visuals and obnoxious industrial music. As a brooding commando, Michelle Rodriguez is the only other remotely interesting cast member. The rest are as stiff as video-arcade targets. | 
