Review: Resident Evil (2002)

Most movies based however loosely on video games--from Street Fighter to Super Mario Bros. to Lara Croft: Tomb Raider to Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within--are light on plot and even more slight on character development, but at least are usually at least visually arresting. The latest video game to make a run at the big screen, Resident Evil, somehow manages to go one level lower, though: not only are its characters one-dimensional and its plot tissue-thin, but much of its look and feel has been cribbed from other, better horror movies like Aliens or any one of George Romero's Living Dead flicks.

The plot is such: the Umbrella Corporation--which, according to the somber voice-over man who insists on speaking to the audience even though every words that comes out of his somber mouth is on the screen in big, bright red letters, has products in 90% of American homes--is engaged in nasty biological and viral warfare experiments in a complex called "The Hive" located half a mile below the ridiculously named Raccoon City. Of course, the deadly T-Virus gets released in the Hive, and the artificial intelligence computer Umbrella has watching over the complex, "The Red Queen" (who appears throughout the movie as an annoying little holographic girl), goes apeshit and kills everybody inside. This is unfortunate, as one of the side effects of the T-Virus is that it animates the dead and turns them into flesh-craving maniacs. Oops.

Enter an Umbrella-sponsored commando squad that intends to go down to the Hive to figure out what the fuck went wrong. (Why? Can't the Umbrella Corporation communicate with the Red Queen? And as we see in the first few minutes of the movie, there are, like, a million cameras in the Hive watching everything everybody does. So why not watch the tape at a safe distance?) They drag along Alice (Milla Jovovich), who is apparently an employee of Umbrella hired to guard the "emergency entrance" to the Hive that the commandos are using now. I say "apparently" because the Red Queen, in her infinite wisdom, gassed Alice with some kind of nerve gas, so that she can't remember who she is. (Will somebody find the dipshits who programmed the Red Queen and fire them, please?) The commandos also find a cop at the emergency entrance, and Alice's "husband"--also an employee of Umbrella--down in the train leading to the Hive, and drag them along as well. Now, doesn't this just sound like the most well-oiled military operation this side of Custer's Last Stand or what?

Once inside the Hive, the commando force resolves to shut down the Red Queen who, for whatever reason, doesn't kill them as soon as they walk in, even though she knows they're there and tracks their every move. They do manage to turn the Red Queen off, getting a bunch of commandos knocked off in a bloody (figurative and literal) obvious trap. Unfortunately, in the process of shutting down the computer system, they unlock all the doors and let all the zombies and various other genetic experiments loose. Brilliant.

From there, the movie becomes little more than a shoot-'em-up, with Alice, commando Rain (Michelle Rodriguez) and a few guys, all of whom look pretty much alike (what, was the Umbrella Corporation busy cloning lantern-jawed brunet males, too?) trying to outrun the living dead--who like to gather in small spaces and charge out all at once, almost like they're having huddles to plan strategy and are being perpetually interrupted by those pesky, gun-toting alive people--and get back to the surface before the Hive is permanently sealed.

This may make Resident Evil sound like insipid, so-bad-it's-funny stuff, but trust me: it's not. The characters are all recycled cardboard, just targets to be turned into Zombie Chow. Even Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez, who managed to get their names above the title of the movie in the ads, aren't given much to do. Milla looks adorable throughout, running about in a slinky red dress and patent-leather knee-high boots--just the thing you want to wear when going into a hazardous-materials situation, right?--but she spends most of the movie having flashbacks to the time before the Red Queen gassed her ass or executing Matrix-style flying kicks. Michelle Rodriguez is even worse off: her character is thoroughly pissy even before she gets chomped by a zombie. And considering how quickly Rodriguez's star had been rising because movies like Girlfight and The Fast & the Furious, she might just want to leave Resident Evil off her resume.

Even the lack of plot and characters to give a white lab rat's ass about would be tolerable in the movie were at least scary or funny, but it's neither. The "jumps" are telegraphed so clumsily that the audience knows what's going to happen minutes before any of the characters figure it out--like the trap that (literally) cuts the cast in half, or the flooded room that the antivirus may be in, which is the same room the cast passed earlier and saw a dead body floating in; what do you think the odds are that that same dead body will pop up to threaten them later? And while I have great affection for flesh-eating zombies, they're not used to good effect here. In most of their scenes, they attack in large groups, like waves consisting of flailing arms and clacking jaws, which manages to make them less threatening. In Romero's first two Dead movies, he confined his living characters to small, well-fortified spaces, while the dead were free to roam in the open, thus underlining for the audience just how fucked the living really were. Romero's last zombie epic, Day of the Dead, turned the zombies loose in a large underground complex where experiments were being performed (sound familiar?) and cut down on the scares substantially.

More shocking, though, is how little humor there is to be found in Resident Evil. Most participants in the "shoot-the-monsters-in-the-head" genre understand how ridiculous and riddled with clichŽs it is and work around these challenges by injecting healthy doses of snark. A good example of this approach is John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars, which also dealt with flesh-hungry combatants chasing down a small band of gun-toting good guys. Carpenter's film, though, is laced with smartass comments and winks at the audience, as if he's saying, "Sure, this is derivative shit, but we're having a good time with it, so you should, too."

But the wisecracks are very few and very far between in Resident Evil, and nobody seems to be having a good time--not the actors, not director Paul W.S. Anderson, and certainly not the audience. And if Resident Evil isn't funny or scary--if it's just an exercise in joyless, derivative film making--why, exactly, did they bother to make it at all? And, more to the point, what need is there for anyone to see it?