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I liked the first Resident Evil
for many reasons, not the least of which being that I'm a
consumer whore. I was really looking forward to the second
installment. Now that I've seen it, I think I would have
rather waited longer for them to hire writers that don't suck.
Almost every measurable facet of this movie was
derivative and predictable. So why did I give this movie a 6
out of 10? This
movie is very entertaining.
That's right; It's a bad movie, but it's
damned entertaining. It's jam-packed with mindless action. The
story couldn't tread water, but come on! They have topless
zombies! And explosions! And explosions caused by topless
zombies!
Though the downsides of the movie are indeed
overbearing. The fight sequences were often impossible to
follow, due to really choppy editing. The camera work was
tight in, and they kept switching angles so quickly that all
you could really understand half the time was that there was a
fight going on, and the not-dead people were winning. Also, the dialogue could have been better written by a
hundred monkeys at a single type writer. It had the
occasional witty one-liner, but a movie can't hold up on that
alone. Comedy relief was ham-handedly thrust into the movie
with the addition of comedian Mike Epp's character, an urban
cab driver (I think he was a cab driver, at least) who carries custom pistols and brakes for naked
dead women. From the flow of the movie, and the fact that the
only other black main-character died less then halfway
through, Epp's character might as well have been named
"Token". One cliché follows another in a
seemingly desperate attempt to turn 40 minutes worth of story
into a 2 hour movie. They even threw in a graveyard scene,
where the undead crawl their way out of the graves to be shot
and kicked in the head one at a time in a nice neat orderly
fashion. I did enjoy a fight scene in a church though. Demon
creatures being crushed by crucifixes? If Mel Gibson had
thrown that into "The Passion of the Christ", along with maybe
some of the topless zombies, maybe that would have been
something other then a painfully long snuff film.
And I wont ruin the ending for you, but let's just say
that out of the last 5 minutes of the movie, Milla Jovovich
naked was the only thing that didn't make me want to track
down the director and beat him silly with a big rainbow trout.
Bad ending... very, very bad ending... Which of course sets
them up for a third movie in the "Resident Evil" franchise...
Like I said. It's a bad movie. But if you've got eight
bucks in your pocket, there are a lot less entertaining things
you could spend it on. A couple of better things... but many
worse things. |
