Film Review: Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)
“If you haven’t seen a scantily clad Milla Jovovich see off a pack of rabid mutant dogs with a kung-fu kick, you cannot claim to have lived.” That was the line doing the rounds when the first screen adaptation of the popular video game Resident Evil was released. It may still be the shortest available explanation of why that film passes for one of the more successful examples of the video-game adaptation — a phenomenon which, among gamers and cinephiles alike, has long been a byword for farmyard manure. The 2002 Resident Evil was successful enough to drag itself as far as a third instalment, Resident Evil: Extinction.
The action takes place five years after the events of the previous film, Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Umbrella Corporation’s attempt to test a new weapon in Raccoon City went catastrophically wrong, the vicious T-virus escaped, and more or less the whole of humanity has been turned into zombies whose entire existence amounts to a search for human flesh. The world has since become a post-apocalyptic desert roamed by a handful of surviving human beings, among them a convoy led by Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), bound for Alaska, one of the few places spared infection. The refugees are helped by the series’ heroine, Alice (Milla Jovovich), who has acquired superior physical and mental powers through a change in her DNA. All those powers will come in useful once it turns out the refugees can reach Alaska only by using the vehicles and other resources sitting in Umbrella’s underground laboratory, whose chief scientist, Dr Sam Isaacs (Iain Glen), has his own ideas about what to do with the hordes on the surface.
Like the previous two films, Resident Evil: Extinction makes no secret of its principal purpose: to show, as inventively, as bloodily and as entertainingly as possible, the character played by Milla Jovovich tearing apart apparently unstoppable zombie hordes the way a baby goes at a rattle. The screenplay and the characters are entirely subordinate to that, and the sole exception is the introduction of Claire Redfield, there to placate fans of the original game — just as Jill Valentine was trotted out in the previous film. Paul W. S. Anderson, who wrote all three, is now openly recycling his own riffs: the opening, which is by some distance the most intriguing thing in the film, restages the underground facility of the first instalment and staffs it with a batch of Alice clones. It is a handsome piece of work and it flatters anyone who remembers where they were in 2002, which is rather the point.
And yet, credit where it is due: the makers have plainly put in some effort to make the third film different from the first two. That means hiring Russell Mulcahy, an Australian veteran whose pop promos of a quarter of a century ago remain the chief suspect in the MTV-isation of contemporary Hollywood. This time Mulcahy does a reasonably good job of it, and he is helped enormously by the new desert setting, so different from the dark corridors of the first film and the grim metropolis of the second. There are a few genuinely effective scenes here, including that opening and a couple of nods to post-apocalyptic classics such as The Road Warrior; the crows descending on a ruined Las Vegas petrol station is a shameless lift from Hitchcock, and none the worse for it. The decision to move the franchise into daylight also exposes, quite ruthlessly, how thin the material underneath has always been. Strip away the shadow and the corridors and what remains is a convoy, a mad scientist in a bunker and a great deal of driving.
The supporting cast is treated as so much cannon fodder. Oded Fehr is brought back from the second film only to be disposed of; Mike Epps is on hand for jokes; Iain Glen does the villainous boffin with the weary professionalism of a man who has done this sort of thing on television. Ashanti’s nurse is killed off early and nastily, which is the closest the film comes to a genuine surprise. But the greatest asset is, as ever, Jovovich, still doing the thing she does well — exterminating zombie vermin and looking superb while she is about it. She is given little to act and gets on with the killing, which is the correct professional response to a script like this one.
None of it is the sort of thing that will be studied at film academies. Resident Evil: Extinction is tat, but it is brisk, good-looking tat, made with enough technical competence to see off most of what passes for horror at the multiplex, and it will fulfil its purpose by entertaining an audience prepared to admit to itself that it likes this sort of content. Two films from now, on the evidence of how quickly the formula wears, that audience may be harder to find.
RATING: 6/10
A capsule version is available here. Earlier instalments: Resident Evil (2002) and Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004).
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