If you thought that the first Resident Evil movie made you dumber for watching it, HOO-BOY, the sequel will turn your brains into potato salad. You’ll be talking to your coat rack afterward. You’ll drive to the supermarket and forget to put on pants. It’s dumber than a toaster by the bathtub. There ain’t five minutes here that make a lick of sense. I would love to call it subversively campy, but, best I can tell, the makers here aren’t that hip (it’s the sole director credit, as of this writing, for Alexander Witt, who’s been keeping his lights on doing second unit work for a grab-bag of major Hollywood movies over the past couple decades). This plays more like 2004’s idea of Badass, the cinematic equivalent to a Slipknot song (they’re on the soundtrack, of course). It’s a whole lot of shouting and quick cuts, gun blasts and digital effects, surging music and close-ups of an intense and unblinking Milla Jovovich, who’s out to prove that Vogue cover girls can be as hard-boiled as any other egg out there. Or at least SHE can. (Jovovich does consistently look great here; Alexander Witt at least figured that out.)
This movie is so stupid, but it’s also kind of adorable.
I don’t know. I’m a giving person. I have a soft heart. I feed stray cats. If I ever meet Alexander Witt, I’d want to give him a can of shredded tuna in gravy.
This is the SECOND Resident Evil movie. It’s part of my sacred duty to let you know this because the Resident Evil series was one of the earliest ones of its time to decide that it was too cool to include numbers in the title. Resident Evil II? Get out of here! Did Marcel Proust ever write a book called Swann’s Way II? No way, Jose. He continued Swann’s Way with a book called In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. That’s what the real artists do and that’s what this movie series about a supermodel fighting zombies while techno music plays is going to do, too.
Anyway, in the first one, the zombie epidemic started in a mega-corporation’s underground office/laboratory complex. In this follow-up, the problem has erupted above ground into the concrete urban jungle mean streets of Raccoon City. Survival seems impossible in this devastated wasteland where flesh-eaters lurk in every shadow and around every corner. Lucky for Milla Jovovich, her writers and director are happy to disregard all laws of gravity, space, time and common sense to see that she lives to make the next movie.