Movie Review: Resident Evil – Extinction
Yes, I have a thing for Milla Jovovitch and will see pretty much anything that she is in because LtL lurves Milla. There is no denying, however, that her last several movies have been pretty bad. Ok, bad. Ok, really bad. Ultraviolet was a wreck of a movie, which I reviewed a while ago and while the first Resident Evil movie was pretty good for its genre, and the second Resident Evil was ok for its genre, this latest, Resident Evil: Extinction is just dumb: no character development, action sequences that have nothing at stake because we don’t care about any characters other than Alice, and no real point to make other than the bad scientist is bad and the evil Umbrella Corporation is evil.
Yawn.
After she joins up with a small, rag-tag convey of folks who are keeping on the run and barely eking out an existence, I couldn’t help but compare certain elements to Battlestar Galactica. Namely, the sense of exhaustion, of bodies being pushed to the limit, of the mental breakdowns due to living in extreme and sustained crisis situations. Nobody in the convoy looked hungry or tired, yet they would have been rationing supplies. There was no sense of urgency about water, yet they were traveling through the desert. There seemed to be no set plans on how to approach new and unknown buildings and potential dangerous situations. I can suspend my disbelief when it comes to zombies, to the destruction of the world because of an evil corporation releasing a virus, to a mutant superwoman who has serious kick-ass attitude and psychic powers . . . but I what can’t suspend my disbelief about is that the convoy could have lasted more than 1 week. Even in the most extreme, odd, unbelievable, far out, or bizarre situations if the characters act like people would act, then the audience can buy into anything. But the moment you have people who are survivers acting stupid, people who are military trained acting like idiots whose only training was a video game, then the suspension of disbelief stops suspending.
Lucky for Milla fans, her next two film projects look considerably more interesting. Slated to start shooting this summer is Azazel, based on a novel by Boris Akunin:
Plot intro (from NY Times): Erast Fandorin, a government clerk turned detective, makes for an unlikely but gifted sleuth in late nineteenth-century Russia. The action opens a few years before the assassination of Czar Alexander II which begins the dark slide to war and revolution. A rich young man has killed himself in Moscow’s Alexander Gardens, having spun a single cartridge in a revolver’s chamber, pulled the trigger and lost at a game said to have been thought up in the Klondike gold fields and therefore called American roulette. The suicide note ostensibly explains the young man’s motive: “Your world nauseates me, and that, truly, is quite reason enough.” He has left his fortune to Baroness Margaret Astair, a British educator famed for her world-wide organization of progressive orphanages, which will shift the action for a time to England.
Not much is available about her other film, The Palermo Shooting , other than she is playing herself and its being directed by Wim Wenders and is currently in post-production. By virtue of the director alone, it promises to be at least an interesting film.
If you lurve Milla as well, Resident Evil: Extinction is worth a rental. But if you don’t have a major, unreasoning, somewhat stupefying crush on Milla, don’t bother.