Overall Rating
 Awesome: 17.74%
Worth A Look: 23.12%
Average: 21.51%
Pretty Bad: 10.22%
Total Crap: 27.42%
6 reviews, 150 user ratings
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| Resident Evil |
by Erik Childress
"No Quality Kills?!!! Paul W.S. Anderson YOU SUCK!!!"
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Have we changed that much? Is Hollywood so afraid to bring the violence these days that we can’t even get a good blood-splatter gorefest zombie movie? Even a script with a brain deader than the walking corpses that inhabit its pages, directed with utter incompetence by a Grade-ZZZ filmmaker and populated by undistinguishable actors and models with a total of two-and-a-half facial expressions between them all can be uplifted with a little old-fashioned head-lauping and membrane munching. Resident Evil is what comes from taking John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars and eliminating the beheadings. In other words, about as bad a film you’re likely to see all year.Horror films have always hung on the bottom of the genre ladder, partly because most of them are uninspired retreads with no thought, no imagination and nothing scary. Combine the worst of that with the subgenre of the video game-inspired flick and you’ve got a recipe for an insured crapbomb. In the bloody world of electronic carnage that is Resident Evil, you’re goal was to runaround a wasteland of a city avoiding or blowing away the inhabiting zombies looking for their next meal.
The film version acts like one of those letterboxed storypoints that introduce you to each new chapter of the game, except you can’t hit the “enter” button and skip over them. In this virtual prologue to the original game, we’re introduced to mega-capitalist Umbrella Corporation, who while in charge of health care and other vital societal needs, also dabbles in governmental viral and weapons research. With a HAL-9000-like security system in place (known as “The Red Queen”), it seems hard to fathom how someone is able to release their new strain of virus within the company, located several miles underground. This Red Queen doesn’t screw around, locking down the facilities and killing all its employees. Or so it thinks.
Turns out this new viral strain that was sabotaged was created to bring our soldiers back from the dead. (Seems a little risky considering the undead’s “need to feed” could include members of their own platoon, not to mention how disobeying a direct order would become moot.) Never mind that though because we’re sending in our best to control the situation. All 7 of them. So well trained are they that not only do they strip away their gas masks in what is likely a highly contaminated area (just so we can see their faces.) but they also drag along three civilians for the operation, one of them (identifying himself as a cop) (Eric Mabius) whom they handcuff. A blonde looker (Milla Jovovich) with “temporary amnesia” from the gassy lockdown and the husband (James Purefoy) from her “arranged marriage” are the others. What their marriage has to do with anything is anyone’s guess.
Resident Evil isn’t trying to break any new ground here. Then again, “new” is likely not a word in the director’s vocabulary. Every horror film doesn’t have to be original, it just has to bring the scares and, most importantly, the fun. Gore gets a bad rap sometimes. When used in the context of most slasher films, gore is the old standby for originiality and often serves as a distasteful way to revel in someone’s death. On the other side of the bloody rainbow, gore in the face of monsters and the supernatural can be like a hit of crack to the diehard horror fan, and its more jovial than mean-spirited because we understand we’re dealing with make-believe. In this respect, the filmmakers of Resident Evil don’t even respect its core audience.
There is not a single quality kill in Resident Evil. Not one. Nada. Every time we’re setup for any of our characters to meet a gruesome death, the film either cuts away, fades to black or we take the victim’s point of view staring down the gun barrel. A major sequence involving a slicing laser security system is completely mishandled with ultra-fake prosthetics and slow moving CGI human bits. For the definitive version of this scene, rent the overlooked science fiction gem, Cube. Even the zombies aren’t having much fun outside of some munching noises on the soundtrack. Taking into account the adage of our imagination concocting things far scarier than anything we can see with our eyes, why should we be expected to use ours when the filmmakers clearly have none of their own?
And that means you Paul Anderson! This is your second video game translation (after the horrible Mortal Kombat) and your batting average ain’t improving. (Anyone remember Kurt Russell in Soldier? Anderson was responsible for that travesty as well.) Someone please bench this guy before he gets his hands on Halo. I wouldn’t even trust this guy with Q-Bert. False alarms are about the best Anderson can do to shock an audience and there are about 14 in this film. (Swear to God, count ‘em.) Event Horizon was a unsettling (and underappreciated) little sci-fi shockfest and unless he used up all the corn syrup in Hollywood, why he decided to go with a lower blood & gore percentage that that of the actual video game, I’ll never understand. His action sequences are even reduced to cutting to people shooting, then to people falling down with no sense of place or impending doom.
Anderson is credited this time as “Paul W.S. Anderson”, as if anyone would seriously confuse him with Paul Thomas Anderson of Boogie Nights and Magnolia fame. (P.T. Anderson would have had mutations falling from the sky.) Using no more time and energy to discover what all four of his names are, I’ve concluded that the initials in the name of the hack Paul Anderson stand for “Whoopty Shit.”
He isn’t helped much by his cast either. Did Milla Jovovich marry him too? That’s the only way to explain how she keeps getting lead roles. The last time she headlined a major film we were subjected to one of the worst performances in cinema history as Joan of Arc in The Messenger. When Milla is called on to start discovering hidden truths about her character’s amnesia, she looks as if she’s surprised she can still stand upright. The SWAT team and anonymous men are interchangeable deer in the headlights and Michelle Rodriguez’s continued one-note presence has forever earned the title of Pouty McGirlfight.Not that its my style, but I’m gonna cut right to the chase here and just give you a list of the far superior films that Resident Evil borrows from but could only dream to replicate. Get a pen and paper, write these titles down and go to the video store. "Night of the Living Dead", "Dawn of the Dead", "Dead Alive", "Aliens", "Re-Animator", "The Evil Dead" and "Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn". It may cost you more to rent all those movies than to plunk down $8.50 for Resident Evil, but trust me, it’s the only way your money will be well-spent.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=898&reviewer=198
originally posted: 03/15/02 12:24:50
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Trilogy Starters: For more in the Trilogy Starters series, click here.
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USA
15-Mar-2002 (R)
DVD: 07-Sep-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
25-Apr-2002
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