Album Reviews
Movies
Concert Reviews

Top 10
Resources
Contact Us

Resident Evil, a film based on a video game, is so inept it makes Lara Croft: Tomb Raider look like Citizen Kane. Not having played the video game, I won't comment on how close the film is to it, but as a movie, it is confusing. Resident Evil combines elements of Alien and Night of the Living Dead  with dull dialogue and standard horror movie cliches. 

The premise is that a secret underground research laboratory called The Hive is suddenly attacked by the Red Queen, its main computer. In opening shots, people are picked off right and left in gruesome ways. Think a female HAL (2001 Space Odyssey) here. Enter a hearty band of troops who want to disarm the Red Queen’s mainframe. The lab manufactures a virus that turns people into hungry zombies. Why? To dispose of an opponent's army through cannibalism, I imagine, but the inventors haven’t thought through what would happen when food supplies run low . . .

In a side story, a lovely blonde (Milla Jovovich who played Joan of Arc) wakes up in a shower with no memory of how she got there. Putting on the barest of clothing, she finds the troops who recognize her as one of their own. As the group encounters walking corpses and zombie dogs, Jovovich regains her memory and fighting skills from The Matrix handbook, but not her clothes.

Resident Evil runs just like a video game except there are no surprises here. You can start counting, five seconds and there will be a scare, five more seconds and there will be a walking corpse, and there they are. Special effects are average, and the makeup department went overboard with gore. Obstacles run from an imaginative room where a lethal laser light fires at different heights to disarm opponents to a giant licker with a circuitous tongue. However, the soundtrack does rock.

Acting is non-existent. This film will be deep-sixed on resumes. To bring a video game to the big screen, one needs a main character that glows. Angelina Jolie had it in the first Lara Croft film. The camera zeroes in on Milla Jovovich who only manages to look disinterested. She has no sparkle and even though her stunts are designed to be deadly, they are few and far between. Having her unconscious with no memory makes for a poor opener. We need a heroine who is THERE, right away. Michelle Rodriguez (Girlfight) at least gets points for ferocity.

If Resident Evil had an interesting script, actors would have had something more to do than pose with armaments and yell, “Look out!” There are more games in this series. Let's hope studios don’t line up to film them.

Copyright 2002 Marie Asner 3/19/2001
 
 
 

.