Resident Evil: Extinction

September 21st, 2007 by James Cook | Source:

Directed by: Russell Mulcahy
Written by: Paul W.S. Anderson
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Oded Fehr, Ali Larter, Iain Glen, Mike Epps, Ashanti

Score: 5/10

Ladies and gentlemen we have our first videogame-movie trilogy! It would seem that a trilogy based on any videogame franchise was inevitable even though there’s never been a videogame-movie that’s blown anyone away. You can thank Uwe Boll for that, but none the less Uwe Boll wasn’t able to touch the Resident Evil series – thankfully. I have to admit though that the first Resident Evil is a pretty fun movie, sure it never amounted to anything other than a guilty pleasure, but considering other videogame adaptations Resident Evil is something of a gem.

But then there was Resident Evil: Apocalypse a movie that was straight up terrible. The two movies made a fair chunk of change so here we are with the third in the series and with any luck hopefully the last.

The world is over and the undead out number the living. Alice (Milla Jovovich) let’s us know at the beginning that “if you want to stay alive you have to keep moving”. It’s exactly what she’s doing as she’s moving from one desolate place to the next. Her goal is to make it to Alaska which still has some kind of civilization. Along the way she’s faced with hoards of flesh eating zombies as well as some unsavory living characters.

The movie seemed to be working early on, when it’s just Alice and her motorcycle going cross country trying to stay alive it isn’t half bad. But I don’t think that ever happened in the games so it’s quickly squashed as Alice soon meets up with a convoy of people. Returning characters Carlos (Oded Fehr) and L.J (Mike Epps) are among them as well as newcomer Claire (Ali Larter). Even when she’s helping this gang of people survive it’s still half decent popcorn fare, but when it starts to be about Alice and her crazy “powers” it loses what little it had going for it.

Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen) is back and working out of a slick underground facility much like the same facility seen in the first movie. He’s bent on trying to cure the disease, and if memory serves at the end of the second movie he had just modified Alice into some sort of weird cyborg with special powers that could be controlled by satellite. Can’t it just be about the zombies? Isaacs is using clones of Alice to create a serum that will help control the zombie population – a storyline very similar to Romero’s Day of the Dead. The clones aren’t working, and he needs the original in order to make it a success. So why the hell did he let her go at the end of the second one? Just one of the many plot holes that are layered throughout Extinction.

The ultimate downfall of Extinction is much of what killed the second movie, killing zombies is fun but when you start to introduce a bunch of bullshit involving genetic experiments and human clones it becomes a lot less fun. All of that kind of story seems to stem from the video games (I’ve never played any of them so I can only assume) and its crap like that that doesn’t translate to the big screen. That sort of weird story might be cool when it’s just you in a dark room with a controller, but when I’m watching a movie called Resident Evil: Extinction, I’d much rather have it be about a bunch of people trying to survive and having them fight off swarms of zombies.

Overall, while Resident Evil: Extinction is a big step up from the previous movie it’s still a piece of garbage. More zombie battles, less crazy experiments and infected CGI crows would have been a big plus. Fans of the video games might enjoy it more, but anyone else should just skip it.