Resident Evil: Extinction

The good news is, there’s a sequel! This was number three and there will be a number four. You can’t have too many zombies. Obviously this is another in the Resident Evil series, starring Mila Jovovich, who reprises her role as Alice, the strange, enigmatic, survivor of research-gone-horribly-wrong at the Umbrella Corporation, a multi-national conglomerate of genetic researchers, who, based on their track record, are really zombie manufacturers. Her blood is the key to a vaccine needed to save the human race from the walking, eating, dead. This time, the virus has spread and the whole world is a vast wasteland, with a few human survivors and lots and lots of gnarly dead people vying for what little living flesh is left. It takes place mostly in daylight, which is a departure from the genre formula, and it works. Alice falls in with a caravan of survivors, a motley crew of adults and children, traveling in several vehicles, (Hummer II, Army Duce and a half, school bus, television van and a tanker truck,) radically retrofitted for safety in the new world. They are led by a woman named Claire, played by Ali Larter (the girl who suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder and kills people by tearing them to pieces in “Heroes”). Her right hand man is Oded Fehr, the actor who played that cool tattooed guy who led the Feydahin in The Mummy. An evil scientist (working for Umbrella) played by Lain Glen, is looking for Alice—he needs her blood to make an army of domesticatable, virus-infected zombies so he can rule the world. Guess what happens to him . . . . .?There is the requisite killing and gore and slow-motion effects, cool fight sequences and bloody death. Alice is a killing machine—it’s what she was engineered for. Now, thirty or forty years ago, this would have been the goriest movie ever made and would have been banned, I’m sure. Today, it barely rates an R and I am forced to say that, by today’s standards, this one is pretty tame, mainstream even. (What slippery slope?). Were we to need a rationalization, we would remind the audience that almost everybody who is killed is already dead, and pretty damned evil as well. For the genre, I thought it was great. It delivered everything I wanted it to. Jovovich is stupendous—she has really taken Alice for her own. And this time, she is developing some interesting psionic powers as well. It has a few moments that actually startled me, which is rare. Really, there were autonomic reactions involving several millimeters of motion, more than once. It’s brutal, relentless, and, let’s be serious, pointless. I put it up there in my top twenty of Classic Not-Very-Good-Movies that I like. A lot of it takes place in a deserted, dune-covered Las Vegas (you’ll be able to recognize the road to Lake Mead that cuts through Sunrise Mountain). This movie is, by way of reminder, based on a computer video game. I’ve never played it. I hate video games. But my son assures me that Resident Evil is above average. Which, to me, is kind of like saying that among cancers, rectal is above average. Was that over the line? Let me know . . .Anyway, I liked it mucho-a-lot. Can’t wait for the next one. I’m not even going to tell Nita I saw it. Even that would frighten her. You will hate it. Don’t go. By the way, did you like that word, Feydahin? I made it up.