Resident Evil (2002) Screen Gems/Action-Horror RT: 101 minutes Rated R (language, strong graphic horror violence, brief partial nudity) Director: Paul W.S. Anderson Screenplay: Paul W.S. Anderson Music: Marco Beltrami and Marilyn Manson Cinematography: David Johnson Release date: March 15, 2002 (US) Starring: Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Mabius, James Purefoy, Martin Crewes, Colin Salmon, Ryan McCluskey, Oscar Pearce, Indra Ove, Anna Bolt, Joseph May, Robert Tannion, Heike Makatsch. Box Office: $40.1M (US)/$102.4M (World)
Rating: ** ½
I don’t play video games and I generally don’t like movie adaptations of video games. I find that they’re usually pretty awful. Movies like Super Mario Bros., Double Dragon, Street Fighter and the Mortal Kombat flicks do absolutely nothing for me (aside from boring the hell out of me!). I didn’t even bother seeing Wing Commander at the cinema.
I wouldn’t have bothered with Resident Evil either but for the fact that it stars Milla Jovovich (The Fifth Element). She’s freaking HOT! Plus, she looked totally bad ass in the trailers. I decided to catch a weeknight show and ended up liking it better than all of the other video game movies. I realize this isn’t exactly high praise, but it’s about the highest praise that I can muster for this reasonably entertaining action-horror about a group of people fighting off zombies at a secret genetic research facility called “The Hive”. It’s actually controlled by the Umbrella Corporation, an international pharmaceutical company. Their products (which also include cosmetics and other consumer goods) can be found in almost every household in the world. Secretly, they conduct research into biological weapons and genetic engineering. The Hive is an underground facility located about a mile under Raccoon City. The trouble starts when a vial containing something called “The T-Virus” is dropped. That causes the main computer (known as “The Red Queen”) to lock down the entire facility and gas everybody trapped inside to death. They don’t want the infection to spread to the outside world.
Meanwhile, our heroine Alice (Jovovich) wakes up on the floor of her shower with total amnesia. She’s in a large deserted mansion and appears to be alone. She finds a drawer full of weapons. She also encounters a strange man called Matt (Mabius, Ugly Betty) running around. Suddenly, a team of armed commandos burst in and take charge of the situation. It turns out the mansion conceals the secret entrance to the Hive. There’s an underground train that will take them right to the secret underground facility. The commando team includes bad ass chick Rain (Rodriguez, Machete) and team leader “One” (Salmon, Alien vs. Predator).
The team takes Alice and Matt with them to the train station where they discover Spence (Purefoy, John Carter), another person suffering from amnesia. When the Red Queen shut down the Hive, it also released a nerve gas in the mansion that knocked out Alice and Spence. It turns out they both also work for the Umbrella Corporation, posing as a married couple and guarding the secret entrance to the Hive. The commando’s mission is to shut down the Red Queen and reopen the underground facility. According to the Red Queen (manifested as a holographic image of the chief programmer’s daughter), this action would have dire consequences. Naturally they don’t listen to her warning; they go ahead and disable her anyway. All of the doors open and the team find themselves up against a horde of blood-crazed zombies and mutated creatures. You see, the T-Virus does kill people, but they don’t stay dead. Instead, they become zombies. Alice and the team must fight their way back to entrance before the Hive automatically shuts its doors for good.
Alice slowly regains her memory and learns that she has major fighting skills. She also remembers that she was involved in a plan to sneak the T-Virus out of the Hive as evidence of their illegal experiments. All of this sounds pretty great on paper, but under the direction of Anderson (Mortal Kombat), Resident Evil doesn’t play out as well as it should. I’m not really a fan of Anderson’s work; he’s one of those “style over substance” kinds of filmmakers. The movie looks really good, but it’s not as successful on the narrative front. The movie runs longer than it really needs to; consequently, it wears out its welcome before the closing credits start to roll.
I realize that it’s the 21st century and this movie is aimed at fans of the game, but does the music really need to be this loud and headache-inducing? Whatever happened to the traditional horror movie score that usually accompanies something like this? On the upside, Jovovich kicks ass! I’ve known this since she successfully fought alongside Bruce Willis in The Fifth Element (1997). Who would have ever thought that the hippie chick from Dazed and Confused would turn out to be such a bad ass? Michelle Rodriguez is no slouch either. As I seem to recall, she held her own alongside Vin Diesel in The Fast and the Furious.
The movie has a decent amount of violence, but the CGI effects make it look exactly like it’s been created on a computer. Give me the good old fashioned splattery makeup effects of the 70s and 80s any day. The horror genre could use a few more artists like Tom Savini (Friday the 13th) and Rick Baker (An American Werewolf in London). The CGI effects in Resident Evil aren’t bad; they just don’t look real to me. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the Resident Evil franchise; I suppose I’d call it a guilty pleasure kind of thing. They’re all silly movies, but I’m not going to knock anything this gleefully dopey. Besides, you get to see a really hot babe fighting zombies, how can that be a bad thing? It’s enjoyable enough, but it just doesn’t achieve true junk movie greatness.
