I watched these movies weeks ago and wrote the reviews right after, but am just now posting them here. So yeah, I'm not only woefully behind on watching movies, but reviewing them. There's no way I'm getting to 150, but you knew that. Therefore, I'm taking a cue from the corporate overlords that run not only the real world, but the fictional world in the following films, and doing a chickenshit move our suit-wearing friends like to call a "re-branding"!
150 Movies in 90 Days is now Summer Moviethon! Pretend to like it!
July 9: #37, Resident
Evil
Surprise! It's not bad!
After watching my dad play through the entirety of Resident
Evil on Playstation, the appeal was lost for me and I never beat the
game myself. I played the second one and found it to be incredibly hard right
away, so I lost interest. As far as the movies went, I never gave them much
thought. I thought staging the first one in a lab of some sort was too
different from the game’s setting of a creepy mansion, but it was particularly
one shot that killed any desire to see the movie for me.
It was a slow-motion Matrix-y
moment where Milla Jovovich (the series’ star) is fighting an infected
zombie-dog and she performs the most logical possible attack to dispatch the
dog, running up the side of a wall, jumping off of it, and kicking it across
the face. That was too much for me. I’m sorry, but unless somebody has had a
lot- a lot of martial arts training
or is a natural athlete, their kicks just don’t look right, and watching a
100-pound former model doing wire-fu just didn’t do it for me.
Well, what better time to give this long-running
horror/action mashup series a chance than now? And I’m not gonna lie, the fact
that I have to watch 114 more movies in like a month and all of the five films
are just a shade over 90 minutes long also helps.
You know what? This one surprised me. You’ll hopefully
remember that I am no genre snob, and any movie can get a high grade for me,
because I grade them according to their genre. That means for something like
this, I’m not going to be disappointed when the plot is paper-thin, the
character development is non-existent, and logic is largely thrown out the
window (along with acting).
Which is good, because Resident
Evil has some god-awful acting. When Michelle fucking Rodriguez has one of
the better acting performances in your film, you’re in trouble. The film
suffers early on from several men (who strangely, look almost exactly the same,
like brothers) who really phone in their admittedly corny lines, although
Pasquale Aleardi (J.D.) has to be singled out for saying every line he has in
the most awkward, unauthentic, unnatural way possible. It’s almost like the
director, Paul W.S. Anderson, told him, “Now, act like a guy who is acting! ACTION!” Fortunately, he dies.
Lots of people do, actually. This is actually a rated-R
film, and not just for show. There is a delightfully twisted scene where the
security system uses laser beams to attack the military unit, and it plays out
so wonderfully gruesomely that I don’t even mind that they ripped it off from Cube.
Other stuff I liked- the direction was often fairly
competent, as when Alice (Jovovich) is on the run from the dogs and has a tense
moment where you know there’s a jump-scare coming, but when it comes it’s from
a threat other than the one you expected. Of course, that’s followed by the
awful wire-fu face kick, and most of the action scenes are accompanied by
terrible metal or techno tracks. Also, this film was made over a decade ago and
on a modest budget, so the CGI is a bit dodgy.
However, the action scenes are well done, some cool things
are used such as a computer generated map that shows you where the group is in
a neat transition between scenes, and a satisfying ending that is faithful to
the games and takes the movie nicely into the sequel. This is a great example
of a very good film in its genre and therefore, a pleasant surprise. Grade: B+
July 11: #38: Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Now with EVEN MORE super-serious women beating up zombies!
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (the series ditches the whole
“number” titling in favor of generic dystopian terms) picks up right where the
previous film left off, both in terms of story and in style.
That means you get more over-the-top action, pretty awful
acting outside of a few minor characters and Milla Jovovich (Alice) herself,
and zombies who aren’t really the focus of the film at all. This film also adds
a new female character in Jill Valentine, played by Sienna Guillory. Guillory
is pretty, but she essentially plays the same female-badass type that Michelle
Rodriguez plays. The difference is that Guillory’s acting makes Rodriguez look
like Meryl Streep.
The sequel also features plenty of nameless male soldiers,
generic in look and lack of charisma, who are thankfully only in the film to be
fodder for villains and zombies. Also, this time there’s a new “boss”, to steal
a video game term- a huge monster/zombie hybrid thing named Nemesis. Nemesis is
actually the result of experimentation on one of Alice’s colleagues, and though
he looks cool, he moves about as stiffly as I do when I first get out of bed in
the morning and really just exists to shoot things with a huge gun. Oh, and
there’s a character named LJ who is supposed to be comic relief but instead
makes me want to find the actor who played him and punch him in the dick.
Now, the good stuff. This film is so over-the-top that the
bad acting feels right at home, and somehow Jovovich’s competent performance
doesn’t seem out of place, either. It’s got great action movie cliché moments,
such as people constantly running out
of ammo at key moments. The “out of ammo” cliché gets turned nicely on its ear
at the end of the film for an amusing moment, too. Other great clichés and
tropes add to the fun and frustration of this film simultaneously-
“highly-trained” soldiers fire thousands of rounds at Nemesis, yet somehow only
shoot his armor and never his head.
Shotguns are pumped right after dramatic lines are finished- “Raccoon
City will be completely sanitized…” CH-CHUCK.
The thematic elements are heavy-handed, but they’re there,
at least. The series is really based upon a distrust of large corporations, and
that gets turned up to 11 as the Umbrella Corporation can basically do anything
they want with impunity, as seen by the hard-to-fathom “hoax” twist at the end
that keeps the company out of hot water for their crimes. There’s a less
obvious attack on our “record everything”, voyeuristic culture when a
reporter’s camera ends up taping her own demise, too.
Altogether, Resident
Evil: Apocalypse is a mish-mash of so many different things that it’s hard
to imagine how they packed it all into an hour and a half. Some of it works
(any scene with Jovovich; Game of Thrones’
Iain Glenn as a mad scientist), a lot of it doesn’t (any scene without
Jovovich; Nemesis), but the film manages to have enough fun moments to build
anticipation towards the next installment, which is basically what it’s meant
to do. Grade: B-
July 11: #39, Resident Evil: Extinction
Naked and Confused: The Milla Jovovich Story
I actually laughed out loud when Resident Evil: Extinction began.
Why? Because even though it was completely inconsistent with how the previous
film ended, they somehow continued the streak of having each Resident Evil movie open with Milla
Jovovich naked and confused as to her whereabouts.
Surprisingly, they were able to justify this seemingly
inconsistent beginning and it actually ended up being the most clever opening
scene in the series so far. See, the baddies (specifically Iain Glenn of Game of Thrones fame, who reprises his
role as Umbrella’s mad scientist) have been cloning Alice (Jovovich) and
running her through a gauntlet to see if the cloned version can survive as the
real version would. When the newest one doesn’t, we see a grisly and remarkable
shot that slowly reveals a mass grave of cloned Alices, which is a pretty
gruesome sight and starts the movie off with some genuine intrigue. Why are
they cloning her? Where’s the real Alice?
All that is answered and we find out that Umbrella, like all
evil corporations, is not looking to fix their problem so much as to twist it
to further their diabolical purposes. How so? By turning zombies into
complacent, trainable slaves. Meanwhile, Alice is traversing the country, which
has become a wasteland as the T-Virus has spread all over the earth (except,
strangely, to Alaska, which is described as “isolated” even though IT BORDERS
CANADA).
That’s your plot in a nutshell, and it gives us some nice
set pieces, including a memorable scene with infected birds attacking a
survivor encampment that may not be quite Hitchcockian, but is well done
nonetheless. There’s also a pretty impressive rendering of Las Vegas as a
deserted wasteland near the end of the film, too.
We try not to ask questions, of course. Questions like, “Why
do Umbrella’s goons continue to work for them when the world is obliterated and
overrun with zombies? Do they think they’ll actually get their pensions one
day?” And questions like, “With no one alive anymore to buy Umbrella’s
products, how exactly does the corporation keep thriving so that they can run their
state-of-the-art labs and communicating with their innumerable satellites?” Or
even, “How is it that people are eating old canned goods and racing through
desert environments like Mad Max while every scene dealing with Umbrella’s
higher-ups shows that business is running as usual? Does the world’s
infrastructure being completely destroyed somehow not affect them?” Suppress
those inquisitive instincts!
Anyway, alongside some cool cinematic moments and the
predictably solid action scenes is a good performance by Ali Larter as Claire
Redfield, who is this installment’s female badass, but brings a little more
subtlety to the role (and seems more like an actual person) than her
predecessors, Sienna Guillory (Jill Valentine, Resident Evil: Apocalypse) and Michelle Rodriguez (Rain, Resident Evil). Even LJ, the most
grating character in the series so far, is much less annoying in this film, and
you might just get to see his head blown off in this film, to boot. What’s not
to like there?
If there’s any other criticism to be made of this one, it’s
that the action is strangely backloaded and makes the first 45 minutes kind of
drag in comparison, other than the excellent opening. That’s a nitpick, and
says a lot about the good pacing of the films so far, though. Even the zombies
are better than before, thanks to some genetic modifications that make them
more 28 Days Later than Dawn of the Dead. Grade: B
July 12: #40, Resident Evil: Afterlife
The series runs dry on subtitles...and everything else
I should have known that Resident Evil: Afterlife wouldn’t
keep the momentum up when I watched the flat opening sequence. Essentially, we
see Alice storming Umbrella headquarters and massacring tons of nameless, armed
nobodies. The scene is technically okay, but doesn’t inspire excitement, only
questions. Why does Alice fight hard to eliminate over a dozen soldiers, only
to finally unleash her telekinetic powers to dispatch a mere six of them
minutes later? Couldn’t she have done that in the first place?
For that matter, when it’s revealed that Alice brought some
friends- dozens of clones made of her in the last film- to help, you wonder why
none of them blocked the exit so that Wesker (the bad guy, played boringly by
Shawn Roberts) couldn’t escape. Then you wonder, when the “real” Alice is on
the plane Wesker is using to escape, why she didn’t bring a few clones with her
to beat him up. After all, his powers apparently surpass her own, as he easily
bests her and takes her powers away in the process.
Though she has no special powers, she does walk away from
the eventual crash of the plane, even though the plane itself is reduced to
bits and pieces. Later on, the supposedly powerless Alice jumps high enough in
the air to kick a ten-foot high monster in the face, then shakes it off when he
swats her into a wall with a ginormous axe that must weigh several hundred
pounds.
I wouldn’t pan a Resident
Evil film just for logical issues, though. That’s silly. No, the problem
with this installment is that it doesn’t seem like anybody gave a shit. Sure,
nobody in the cast and crew were under the impression that they were going to
win Best Picture in the previous films, but you could sense a little passion in
the process, nonetheless. This movie instead gets bogged down with a slow, dull
middle third and silly tricks like excessive slow-mo that is used not during a
cool kick or a backflip, but ALL THE TIME. That puzzling directing decision
pretty much ruins the only cool action sequence in the film, in fact.
Even the characters don’t seem to care. When of Alice and
newcomer Luther’s friends gets snapped up by a zombie and dragged away to be
eaten, not only do Alice and Luther fail to show any kind of feeling, but
literally seconds later they’re smiling and saying, “Nice!” as they discover a
room holding a huge weapons cache.
There are some good things going on here. Zombies now have
four sets of clawed tendrils coming out of their mouths, which is a cool sight.
The film ends with an interesting wrinkle that nicely sets up the next
installment, too. This one isn’t really bad,
just completely uninspired. Grade: D+
July 13: #41 Resident Evil: Retribution
The most unlikely comeback since Rocky Balboa (it works two ways!)
Even though I noted that the fourth installment of the
series ended with a decent setup for the fifth, I wasn’t exactly confident that
I’d like Resident Evil: Retribution. After all, how many times does the fifth movie in a series top the earlier
films, especially when there’s already been a drop-off in quality? Okay, other
than with The Fast & the Furious.
Whatever.
Anyway, the opening sequence gets the series back to doing
what it does best: opening in strong fashion. The film begins with a very neat
shot of Alice floating on top of the ocean, as filmed from beneath her in the
water. From there, Alice moves backwards through the air, to where she was
blown off of the boat where the last film ended, and then the huge battle scene
that led to her predicament plays in reverse. It’s a gimmick, sure, but an
undeniably cool one.
There’s also what appears to be a weird dream sequence right
at the start, but later on it makes perfect sense, or as close to perfect sense
as possible in a film series that requires this much suspension of disbelief.
Finally, the lengthy opening gets back to the series’ roots by starting Alice
off naked and confused as to her whereabouts! Ahhh, it’s like being home again.
I even overlooked the fact that while Umbrella has her in an
inescapable prison, the security magically shuts off and some weird leather
bondage wear comes out of the wall
for her to put on. I also overlooked the fact that Wesker is the person behind
the security shutting down, because he has ALL OF A SUDDEN realized that making
the human race extinct is BAD FOR BUSINESS.
I overlooked these things because the setup allows for some
dynamic set pieces and a great escape by Alice. See, along the way to the exit
are huge environments (think “the X-Men’s Danger Room”) that run simulations of
different zombie epidemics, all using living human clones. Is it a silly
gimmick? Sure. Does it make any sense? Not really.
However, I don’t give a crap because the sequences the setup
leads to are awesome. A zombie attack in suburbia, a massive shootout in
Moscow, and two more massive axe-wielding zombie-monsters going after Alice and
newcomer Ada Wong (Li Bingbing) in Times Square (with an excellent car chase,
to boot). There’s a great car chase, as well. Without the simulation gimmick,
all of this stuff wouldn’t be possible, so it’s cool in my book.
Now, there are some things that aren’t so great. Most
notably, when late in the film, every kick and punch the now-evil Rain
(Michelle Rodriguez, because she never stays dead in movies) lands on Alice makes
an annoying bone-breaking sound. It’s not as annoying as the “whip” sound
effect that plagued fights in the second film, but it’s worth mentioning.
Then there’s the end, where Wesker injects Alice with…something that gives her superpowers
again, only for her to get mad for some reason. Why would you be mad about
having badass superpowers? Then, we see some zombie dragon thingies and shit
and oh, who cares, because in the final film, Alice will be going after the
“Red Queen” as the series concludes. I was surprised at how great this one was,
and it gives me hope for the series’ finale, tentatively scheduled for 2014.
The Resident Evil series as a whole
is a lot better than I expected and four of the five films are good
action-horror flicks. Grade: B+
UPDATE: The sixth and final installment will be titled Resident Evil: Afterbirth.
Gross.
