Dir. Russell, Mulcahy, Fr/Aus/Ger/UK/US, 2007, 95 mins
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Oded Fehr, Ari Larter, Iain Glen, Ashanti, Matthew Marsden
Review by Matthew Rodgers
The law of diminishing returns is hard to apply to a franchise that was as dead as a zombie on arrival, with writer/producer Paul WS Anderson’s first video game adaptation of the best-selling Resident Evil series shuffling onto cinema screens in 2000 with painfully bad results. Surely it couldn’t get any worse? Apocalypse was, and now Extinction is the final kill-shot to the corpselike head of this hopefully self referentially titled third act.
Picking up three years after the last film vanished from moviegoer’s consciousness, cyber-babe Alice (Jovovich) is on the run from the Umbrella Corporation who still covet her link to their deadly T-virus. Staying off the radar of the “evil” Dr. Isaacs (Glen) forces her to join up with a ramshackle group of desert-based survivors including returning grunt Carlos (Fehr, The Mummy) with whom Alice has the most unconvincing romantic dalliance, “Sarah Connor lite” Claire (Ari Larter – TV’s Heroes), and obvious zombie fodder L.J. (Mike Epps) and Nurse Betty (Ashanti) to finally, and please let it be that, discover the secret behind her creaton.
The Resident Evil series of films have completely missed the point of what made the game-playing experience so enjoyable. Konami’s intimate strategy/shoot-em-up approach benefited from limited vision, spring wound tension building, and a reliance on the players imagination to complement the on-screen scares as all the best horror movies require – Alien, Halloween, Night of the Living Dead. The film incarnation is brash, loud, CGI-soaked nonsense that has missed numerous opportunities on three unforgivable occasions.
Extinction is littered with ludicrous logic defying scenes that will have you reaching for the reset buttons. How do the thousands of zombies attempting to get into the military compound fail to demolish a fence that is little more than chicken wire? And how, when a single medium sized container is dropped onto our unsuspecting victim,s do what seems like a million zombies emerge from it? And most frustratingly, how in the midst of what we are led to believe is an apocalypse does Ari Larter look like a walking Timotei advert with her conditioned hair?
The sole reason for watching the series thus far has been Jovovich’s unflinching dedication to the project (or the pay cheque) as she injects Alice with an athletic enthusiasm that substitutes for the complete lack of intelligent scriptwriting – choice line “You’re positive it’s her? Yes, 62%” - but even she looks bored throughout her hundreds of make-up endorsing close-up shots and slo-mo roundhouse kicks moving from level-to-level, sorry, set piece-to-set piece.
As with a lot of game-to-film translations Resident Evil: Extinction still views like you are bored watching your best friend play his PS3 for 90mins and without an original bone in it’s limp body – plot is ripped from the carcass’ of Day of the Dead with the “tame a zombie theme” and the whole outline of Alien Resurrection is traced around for the trilogies Alice mythos – unless you want to see how bad “zombie crows” can be I would avoid this one like the plague.
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