Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Despite an increase in budget that allows the filmmakers to make good on the rotting city glimpsed during the conclusion of the previous instalment, Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a one hundred minute long fumble. Instead of a blood-splattered laboratory, Alice (Milla Jovovich) and her disposable friends now have an entire city staffed with grinning mercenaries and the stuttering undead to creep through. Unfortunately, excitement-levels are not similarly bolstered. If anything the inverse is true: the more guns and wobbling, Mardi Gras titans that Apocalypse reveals, the more excruciating the viewing experience becomes. The first Resident Evil film was knowing enough not to gum its gears with this kind of consumptive sightseeing. That piece was more of a conceptual adaptation; one that took fragments of the original PlayStation game then used them to engineer sequences and situations based around the unblinking attention Paul WS Anderson paid to his leading ladies. Anderson's arrangement of bisected bodies (more than a little bit inspired by Vincenzo Natali's Cube) was even arresting enough to reinspire the developers back at Capcom. 

Lauded video game director Shinji Mikami, in a canny bit of call-and-response, translated Anderson's celebrated laser corridor set-piece back into an interactive obstacle for his own Resident Evil 4 (an encounter memorable enough to make its way into an expanded version of this year's remake). Less original by design, thanks to a fanbase that demanded fidelity when considering their polygonal adventures, Alexander Witt's Apocalypse is content to dutifully slog through the kind of material previously deemed extraneous. Witt's day job as a second-unit director for multiple Ridley Scott projects is only really detectable here in terms of a chopped-up intermittence that worms its way into the film's threadbare action sequences. Even when Apocalypse settles into a situation that should lend itself to an entertaining fracas, we are chased away from that moment by either harried cuts that explicitly take us elsewhere or a style of combat coverage best described as a spatial collapse. The only person able to portray fun under these galling circumstances is Sienna Guillory as deputy heroine Jill Valentine. Somehow the actress has managed to tune her performance into the strange frequencies and confident nonsense inherent to compact disc gaming. Her Valentine has bled off the CRT screen; every utterance clanging with the inelegance of tough talk translated from English into Japanese, then back again.