Review: Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)

(NOTE: The following review was originally written for a movie review website to which I used to contribute an essay or two a month for about a year.)

Resident Evil: Extinction begins with the world in a state of total collapse. The T-virus, that nasty little bioweapon unleashed in the original Resident Evil and spread throughout the improbably named Raccoon City in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, has now covered the world, turning the living into refugees and the dead into shambling, flesh-hungry ghouls. Some survivors search of a safe haven, while others—scientists with the evil Umbrella Corporation—try to figure out a way to either stop the virus or, at the very least, control and domesticate the undead.

Does any of this sound even a little bit familiar? Like you might have seen it in a movie before? Several movies, even? If so, it’s not your imagination, but rather the lack of imagination on the part of Paul W.S. Anderson, who wrote the screenplays for all three Resident Evil installments and directed the first. Not only does he continue mining the works of George Romero (especially Day of the Dead this time around), but he also lifts bits from George Miller’s Mad Max movies, X-Men and even Hitchcock’s The Birds.

But you don’t go to a Resident Evil movie for burning originality, do you? You go to see Milla Jovovich kick substantial quantities of zombie ass. And that she does.

Jovovich returns as Alice, the woman genetically altered by Umbrella to be super-strong, super-smart and, apparently, telekinetic—she now makes objects float in her sleep and can throw force fields when she needs to. She hooks up with a caravan traveling through the desert that Carlos (Oded Fehr) and L.J. (Mike Epps) from the previous sequel, as well as tough-as-the-proverbial-nails Claire (Ali Larter from NBC’s Heroes) and medic Betty (singer Ashanti). Meanwhile, in a bunker below the desert, the very, very crazy Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen) is mutating the undead when he’s not creating clones of Alice for some rather pointless rat-in-a-maze experiments and dumping the bodies in a ditch afterward.

There are lots of fights with lots of zombies along the way, plus a final confrontation between Alice and Isaacs. And just in case you were wondering—yes, the ending does leave open the possibility of a fourth Resident Evil (pending box-office results, of course).

Despite the highly derivative script, Resident Evil: Extinction is fast-paced and action-packed, thanks in large part to veteran director Russell Mulcahy (who helmed the first two Highlander films), who keeps things moving while making the battles relatively coherent (unlike in the previous sequel, where it looked like the fight scenes were edited in a blender).

It also doesn’t hurt to have Jovovich, one of the most graceful and charismatic action stars working today, in the lead. Fehr gets to bust some zombie skulls as well, and Larter doesn’t have much to do other than scowl and shoot and look good doing it, so she does all the role requires of her.

Resident Evil: Extinction is, in many ways, the closest film in the series to its videogame roots. Characters run around, punch, kick and try really hard not to get eaten, which is all any player of the game would do. It may not be original--quite the opposite, actually—but it’s also tight, lean and brisk, and that makes it the best in the series so far--if only by default.