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  Richard
  
Attwood
Resident Evil
USA, 2002
[Paul W.S. Anderson]
Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Mabius, Colin Salmon
Action / Horror
  
Based on the extremely successful survival-horror videogames which really popularized the genre, Resident Evil is brought to the big screen by Paul W.S Anderson, the man also responsible for the first Mortal Kombat movie. This time around he gets to direct from a screenplay he actually wrote himself, one which draws most heavily from the first of the game series but is a self-contained new story.

The opening sequence wastes no time at all in setting up the premise of a shadowy multinational corporation, Umbrella, and its secret research lab which is locked down following a deliberate viral outbreak. The company sends in a (presumably elite, they usually are) squad to check for survivors and try to destroy the main supercomputer which killed everyone in the complex as soon as the virus was released. On their way into the lab they discover a man (James Purefoy) and woman (Jovovich) who were employed by Umbrella to live in the mansion, hiding the lab entrance under the pretence of being husband and wife. Unfortunately one of the supercomputer�s defence mechanisms gassed them after the accident and both have acute memory loss. After gaining access to the lab the team discovers that, while everyone was indeed killed, they are still up and walking/shuffling around.

Any zombie action film is not going to be troubling the Academy too much when it comes to handing out acting or writing awards. This is very definitely the case here, with vastly underdeveloped characters, bad dialogue (and not in a homage to the dire voice-acting in the original game) and immense plot holes. However this is hopefully not what you would expect from such a genre and in terms of people running around with zombies and mutants chasing them it pretty much delivers. The zombie make up is good, although the CG on the Licker creature falls far short of realism, and the guns are loud. Jovovich is one of the more capable ex-catwalk actresses around, and even if Rodriguez�s hard chick routine is getting tiresome she can stare out from under her eyebrows with the best of them. For fans of the games there are many familiar themes, especially the ending in Raccoon City and the mention of Nemesis (who�ll be in the proposed sequel). While for fans of Jovovich she wears an fetchingly inappropriate dress throughout, and you even get an �I can�t believe they left that in� crotch peep which would shame Ms. Stone.

Having played the game series (although not the 1st person shooter
Survivor games) this is basically what I expected. Unfortunately it could have been done a lot better. There are plenty of shocks of the zombie-suddenly-jumping-onscreen kind but as usual I reached a tolerance threshold fairly early on to this cheap trick. What the movie failed to import from the games was the overall ominous tension, which was where the genuine fear came from. So it is horrific in the sense of zombies appearing from nowhere and eating people, but not as unsettling in the way that makes you feel constantly unsafe. This probably stems from the underdeveloped characters who you don�t empathize with, but also the minimal time spent in the mansion (which was where the main bulk of the game was set), instead we get the shiny research lab which is an impressive set, but not dingy enough to scare. Also the plot fell quickly into routine, with lots of Aliens-style near misses and attempts at self sacrifice before facing the big baddie. Plus the potentially most impressive death was nicked from Cube (and the one moments before eerily similar to that of a bad Van Damme movie I once saw).

Reading this review it does sound quite negative, but that�s because it would take some work to make a good film from this difficult conversion. It was always going to be a race against time while shooting zombies, which makes for great gameplay but is not necessarily enough to sustain a movie as interactivity needs to be replaced by depth. Having said that, it was perfectly enjoyable to sit through if you can enjoy action and horror without any comic relief; unless you are like me and find a lead character getting axed in the head amusing. Yes, I have made an appointment.
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