Not exactly. I'd describe it more as...a cold, sadistic waste of celebrity skin. Think Starship Troopers. All the bleak sci-fi/horror you can take with none of the humanity.
Let's talk about sadism for a second. Remember that really disturbing part of Scream where the character gets trapped in the garage door? This film kicks it up a notch. This time our pretty young female has her head stuck in an elevator door, and this time the murderer is an evil, malicious building...and this time we get to watch her suffer for even longer. Oh, no, the elevator is going down... your head is going to get smashed against the floor! Ha, ha, just kidding; it stops just in time. We get a nice close-up of the expression on her face. She then pathetically whimpers to the characters inside the elevator, "I can't move. Pull me in..." The characters desperately try to help, and she screams a few more times, "PULL ME IN!" Oh!...but there's no time for that anymore. The camera gives us every shot available as her head speeds up to the ceiling, closer and closer andcloserand... Who's enjoying this? And why?
The movie flashes to Milla naked passed out the shower of a gorgeous mansion. She can't remember who she is, but a huge security squad breaks in and assures her that it's her duty to shut down this random office building. Little do they suspect that they're walking into a zombie breeding ground. But...the movie pretty much ignores the whole zombie thing for a good half an hour or so more. We, instead, get to enjoy watching the office building kill more random, nameless characters.
This time we find a couple of people locked inside a confined space while the building shoots lasers at them. How is this anything but depressing when the characters have no chance of fighting back?
But this sequence at least serves some purpose as this and the first appearance of the zombies finally, halfway through the film, get the character count low enough for the audience reasonably to get a grasp of who's who. Once the murders stop being so random and, uh...building related...the movie picks up some. Some. The addition of human personalities at least keeps everything from feeling so bleak.
This is where I found myself actually enjoying a few sequences...although I was still disappointed at this point in the movie by the presence of characters other than Milla and Michelle Rodriguez. When was Milla gonna kick some ass?
Well, she does get attacked by those dogs. The part from the previews where Milla wall jumps and kicks the zombie dog square in the face? Just as awesome in the movie. It's by far the best and most memorable sequence in the movie, and it's kind of a shame that it doesn't last longer.
All other footage of Milla kicking ass is pretty awesome as well...but it's hard to feel like, considering the extreme amounts of zombie, she's not kicking nearly enough ass. Maybe 5% of the movie consists of actual Milla ass-kicking footage. The rest of the film is mostly characters running away or revealing entirely unnecessary and uninteresting plot twists. Milla makes a very great badass...but very little ass does she kick. Which is, I guess, what I found myself most disappointed by.
It doesn't really feel like much of an action movie. It doesn't really feel like anything. It's like an exercise in style...but without the style.
On the upside, you get a pretty clear view of Milla's vagina at the end. And the final shot was oddly beautiful.
OK, yeah, it's definitely better than Starship Troopers. Milla doing nothing is still bettter than no Milla at all. And at least it's not trying to be hilariously ironic (through trailer for part 2 suggests that we might get that soon enough.)
Resident Evil is marginally entertaining for what it is. But I feel a lot better knowing it was rented on my Blockbuster unlimited movie pass.
