Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D
Unfolding in 3D for the first time, the fourth instalment of the Resident Evil series welcomes back British filmmaker Paul W.S.
Anderson to the helm, eight years after he directed the original.
Afterlife continues the adventures of Alice (Milla Jovovich) as she battles the evil Umbrella Corporation.
Aside from the new screen format and a change of location to post-apocalyptic Los Angeles complete with fire-ravaged Hollywood sign, the latest film delivers all of the same flesh-hungry zombies and blood-spattered action sequences guaranteed to delight the fans of the Capcom video games on which the series is based.
Anderson has evidently been re-watching The Matrix trilogy because almost all of the set pieces rely heavily on slow motion and bullet-time special effects with characters somersaulting to avoid the shells as they skim leisurely through the air.
The fourth film would be at least 10 minutes shorter if everything happened at real-time speed.
Afterlife opens in rain-soaked Japan with the outbreak of the T-virus engineered by the Umbrella Corporation, which sweeps the globe, transforming the infected into the ravenous undead.
Fast-forwarding four years, the action moves to Los Angeles via Alaska and a prison stronghold where Alice and old friend Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), who is suffering amnesia, meet fellow survivors Luther (Boris Kodjoe), Bennett (Kim Coates), Crystal (Kacey Barnfield), Angel (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) and Kim (Norman Yeung).
Claire's long lost brother, Chris (Wentworth Miller), just happens to be imprisoned in the basement and he leads the motley crew against a ferocious new evolution of the undead with mandibles, which can burrow through walls.
Resident Evil: Afterlife doesn't scare us once and the action sequences feel pedestrian with all of that slow motion.
Anderson does at least try to make use of the 3D technology.
Bullets fly out of the screen and in one chase sequence, skull fragments and brains explode from the back of zombies' heads as Alice aims her trusty pistols at their noggins.
There is scant emotion amidst all of the barbarity - even Chris and Claire's potentially moving reunion after four years is a non-event.
Jovovich looks fabulous performing her own stunts and Larter proves her action credentials in a showdown with The Axeman, a superhuman hooded lunk, who features in the games.
Again to please fanboys and girls, there is a hideous new iteration of the hell hounds, which have snarled in all of the previous films.
Characters run for their lives for much of the film, huffing and puffing when they aren't delivering Anderson's turgid dialogue.
Our pulses don't race once.
Wait until the end credits for a cameo from Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), who appeared in Resident Evil: Apocalypse and will presumably feature heavily in a fifth film.
You have been warned.
Release Date: Friday 10 September 2010
Certificate: 15
Runtime: 96mins
