As far as the Resident Evil games are concerned, I am a huge fan. Movies? Not so much. I liked the first one despite its flaws and the second half of the second movie was okay. The last one blew. The trailers for Resident Evil: Afterlife looked kind of promising with the addition of Chris and Wesker to the mix but unfortunately the promise was nowhere to be found in the movie.

The story picks up pretty much right where the last one ended with Alice and her army of genetically engineered clones are taking their fight to the underground Tokyo offices to take revenge on Umbrella in general and Albert Wesker in particular. While this offered up some genuinely cool action scenes, I couldn’t help but think about how by taking revenge she was wiping out a significant portion of the remaining human population. I mean sure they were assholes and all but talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

When she gets to Wesker it turns out he is a super badass and can escape a massive explosion with only minor facial damage. As he is flying away on his Umbrella plane the real Alice shows up in the plane to kill him. He gets the drop on her and injects here with an antidote to whatever T-Virus shenanigans she has going on her blood stream thus making her human again. Wesker lets her know that he is now what she used to be and kicks her ass. Then the plane crashes and we are treated to the most awkward still frame shot in history. It was sort of like what would have happened if Zack Snyder fell asleep editing the opening credits of Watchmen and forgot to hit the advance button. You are just sitting there in the audience watching this still frame scene  like you are looking through a view master.

That is just the set up. Next Alice goes to Alaska, finds Claire with little robot gem spider on her chest that has taken her over and made her forget everything and then they go to Los Angeles for no apparent reason other than they need somewhere to go. They end up at a prison installation apparently in downtown LA where a group of survivors, including Claire’s brother Chris, are holed up and trying to get to a massive freighter style ship out in the bay that is sending out signals that it is a safe place.

From a story perspective, Resident Evil is a film franchise in DESPERATE need of a reboot. When they made the outbreak global and made it all post-apocalyptic they lost a whole lot of story possibilities and the things they are contriving to keep survivors around and set up typical post zombie scenarios are just ridiculous. They also feel just as tacked on as they are.

The games are pretty silly and pulpy when you get down to it but there is a rich history and deep conspiracy there that would translate fine to what will always essentially be B-movies. The characters themselves, if handled well, are also all more compelling than any that have shown up in the films. Leon S Kennedy’s left testicle, for instance, is at least 65% more badass than an army of Alices. Chris is way more badass in the games than he is here as are Claire, Jill and Carlos (although the last one died off in the last movie). It seems to me if they would have just stuck to the games they would have at least had a better road map. Here they have just written themselves into a corner and if the ending of this one is any indication, they aren’t even really thinking about stopping.

Of course all of this would be forgiven if the action were cool and it is sometimes but most of the way through it is just kind of silly. Rather than embrace this and just be a good bad movie, directer Anderson tries to go with making it slick and serious. And it is slick and seriously stupid looking most of the time. It changes on a shot by shot basis. Some of the shots looked really great and the very next one would undermine that by looking like something a four year old might have set up but only if they were paying attention to something else at the time.

They tried to add some variety by putting the Las Plagas from Resident Evil 4 and the big ax guy from Resident Evil 5 but they did so without explanation so all of a sudden you just have dudes with their heads splitting open and no idea why. Or this huge dude with an ax the size of a medium sedan wandering in from the streets and trying to kill them. ANY explanation for this whatsoever would have been nice but you can’t put those sorts of marketing notes right into the film.

There were some nice things. It was good to see Wesker in action as the main villain and Shawn Roberts plays him perfectly. He has just the right amount of smarm, contempt and attitude and pulls the whole thing off very well. You may remember from my Resident Evil 5 review and my gushing over Wesker. That is more or less intact here. They could have done better things with him but he was pretty awesome anyway.

Less awesome but still kind of cool was seeing Chris Redfield finally in action. Why it took four movies to bring one of the main heroes from the games to the screen is beyond me but I am glad they finally did it. Prison Break’s Wentworth Miller did an alright job with the role but it didn’t really FEEL much like Chris at the end of the day anymore than Claire has ever felt like Claire and so on.  Again, had this been Chris from any of the games it would have been a much better character but instead he is just another big guy that can shoot pretty well.

The 3D was not bad here. Shot with a 3D camera and framed to make use of it, the gags generally work and the depth of field is impressive. There are a lot of gimmicky moves with shit flying straight at the camera and most of that actually looks pretty cool. It wasn’t like in Piranha 3D where stuff was SUPPOSED to come out at you and failed so that is something. It is easily the best looking 3D film since Avatar but given the glut of substandard 3D product we have had to put up with since that film that isn’t saying much and certainly can’t save the film.

Conclusion [ 4.5 out of 10]

Resident Evil Afterlife is just a mess. It is paced badly, barely has a story, very inconsistent action and the story was nothing more than bare connective tissue between action set pieces. There are really good things that could be done with this franchise but they are not being done. The 3D here is good and some of the set ups take good advantage of it but the movie itself is just a mess and ends up being pretty boring. You shouldn’t be checking your watch every five minutes during 3D zombie killing extravaganza. I say take this whole thing back to formula.