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| Resident Evil: Extinction |
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Genre
End-of-the-World
Length
94 minutes
Director
Russell Mulcahy
Major Stars
Milla Jovovich
Ali Larter
Oded Fehr
MPAA Rating
R
Year Released
2007
Review Posted on
11/4/2008
Rating
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Review by Troy Larson
I give. Please stop making Resident Evil movies. It’s massively f***** up when you can turn this into an economically-successful movie franchise.
I’ll admit, when the original came out to respectable praise, it did bring an aura of legitimacy to movies that began as a concept for a video game. And the sequel was pretty okay too. But this is too much. Seriously.
First, at the beginning of the movie when Milla Jovovich does a voiceover explanation of events thus far, she explains how the human race has come nearly to extinction and the continents are now barren deserts. The very next sequence is an aerial shot of the desert. And I wonder immediately if the story has been modified on a whim by a screenwriter or director who thinks post-apocalypse pictures have to look like a Mad Max movie (or a Tupac Shakur video if you prefer). No green stuff allowed please! OK, me being anal. I’ll grant you.
In the first minutes of the movie our primary heroine Alice [Milla Jovovich] is killed (to my great puzzlement). Then we’re informed she was merely one clone of dozens… presumably so we won’t be surprised when a character who should be dead shows up alive later in the movie. I think it’s always good for a character to be made disposable, don’t you? Who cares if she lives? They’ll just poop out another copy of Alice and we can try again. Maybe somebody could have asked Sigourney Weaver how that worked out for Ripley’s box office receipts.
But, when we get to the first major action sequence–I say ‘major’ because there’s no shortage of action, major, minor, necessary or unnecessary–it’s Alice versus a redneck family who lured her to a radio station with a phony distress broadcast. They’ve trained the now-familiar Resident Evil hellhounds to attack like doberman junkies on t-virus dope, and Alice’s first battle is a protracted one with multiple slimy red mutts. Once she escapes from the mutts–and the rednecks–the real movie can begin.
The t-virus has destroyed the world. To survive, humans must stay mobile and ready to confront any number of viral villains, including the aforementioned doggies, infected birds, and of course a plethora of zombies.
It only took forty-nine minutes before I saw a scene that was so derivative, so cheesy, so poorly done that I wanted to press ‘Stop’ soooo bad… a scene where the scientist–Dr. Isaacs [Iain Glen]–has a conversation with a holographic character in a black suit and black shades. The actor whose name I have been unable to track down appears to be overtly trying to emulate the appearance and tight-mouthed speech pattern of Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith from the Matrix movies. And the special effect used when the holograph disappears is so cheap, it reminded me of my days grazing episodes of Star Trek: Voyager on UPN–cheap special effects to make up for bad storylines–it’ll work great! Once I saw this scene, I couldn’t stop thinking about how some movie studio head saw the first cut of Extinction and said
“You know I don’t see any hipness to this cut… couldn’t you add some of those snazzy suits and Ray-Ban sunglasses like the Matrix? All the kids seem to love that stuff these days.”
And some studious little movie rat went and wrote it into the movie as an afterthought.
Ali Larter is too hot and feminine for a badass chick in a post-apocalyptic world, not to mention too clean–rub some dirt on her face will you? The cowboy character is annoying. The science storyline is a waste of time. The blood is excessive and unnecessary and has lost its power to shock. And something about the Resident Evil franchise taking a post-apocalyptic turn–with earthtone textures and cloudless blue skies–in a story that began as a tale about zombies in a gothic mansion… it just doesn’t seem right. I almost wonder if they went too-far to the science fiction end of the scale when maybe they should have stayed to the left end of the suspens
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