Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Length: 1 hour, 34 minutes
Studio: Screen Gems
Website: http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/residentevilapocalypse/
Release Date: 2004-09-10
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Mike Epps, Oded Fehr, Jared Harris
Director: Alexander Witt
Screenwriter: Paul W.S. Anderson
Music Score: Jeff Danna
WorkNameSort: Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Our Rating: 2.00
The good news for fans of 2002’s top guilty pleasure, Resident Evil: The zombie dogs and Milla Jovovich are back. The bad news: Director Paul W.S. Anderson has been replaced by first-timer Alexander Witt, whose journeyman effort totally lacks Anderson’s smart-trash poetics and pulp-art visual sense. As zombies overrun Raccoon City, the Umbrella Corporation uses the conflagration to try out its latest mutant monster, Nemesis. Meanwhile, Jovovich and some elite fighting-unit types have until dawn to find a scientist’s daughter before Umbrella nukes the town. Anderson would have milked the film’s oft-crazed conflation of mad science, lost mutant love and corporate greed gone neo-Nazi for every high-junk dollar. But Witt only has one mood/lighting scheme (gloomy/dark) and one pace (really fast). Still, he serves up some serious whoa with his 007-y shots of Alice rappelling a skyscraper; the Alice vs. Nemesis face-offs are fairly zippy; and the film’s portrayal of a prone media lying for The Company provides timely verisimilitude.
This article appears in Sep 15-21, 2004.