"Resident Evil: Apocalypse" is based on a video game I have never played.
I can't testify to how this film relates to its gaming counterparts. I can't say if the film's star Milla Jovovich is a good representation of the story's heroine or if the violent fight scenes live up to the first-person gaming experience.
I can say, however, that this is an exciting, frightening and thoroughly entertaining film. It's definitely worth the price of a movie ticket, but not much more.
As the film begins, we learn that a virus has escaped an underground testing facility called "The Hive." The citizens of Raccoon City become infected with the virus, morph into slow-moving zombies that rabidly prey on healthy living flesh and turn their victims into zombies themselves - standard living-dead procedure.
The Umbrella Corporation, the creator of the virus, plans to quarantine the city and scale a full-blown cover-up of its mistakes.
Jovovich returns in this sequel to 2002's "Resident Evil" as Alice, Umbrella's superwoman lab rat. She is detained at the end of the first film, but returns in "Apocalypse" to aid her fellow humans in wiping out zombies.
Director Alexander Witt balances his scenes with fast edits and extreme long shots. We see Alice, fresh out of the lab, wandering through the deserted city streets like a little lost rabbit. It's a great juxtaposition to later moments in the film when she is kicking butt.
The film's scariest, most frantic scenes take place in a church where some of Umbrella's mutated lab animals hunt the humans hiding inside. These cellularly-mutated creatures prove to be quite capable of bolting from the shadows to frighten the audience.
Neither Jovovich nor Sienna Guillory (who plays human vigilante Jill Valentine) are qualified to deliver a convincing line, but their characters excel at kicking, punching and capping zombies and mutants alike. It's nice to see today's actresses taking on strong action hero roles.
Though the plot suffers from an overdose of deus ex machina, as characters always arrive to save the day just in the nick of time, the movie remains successful as a nice morsel of fright-causing entertainment. It delivers short-term fulfillment as it amuses and scares, but it's not the fare that sticks with you outside the theater doors.
