Sunday, October 10, 2010

RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE (2010) - Only slightly better than a toothache

Every once in a while, you see something during the course of your average day that makes you feel terribly sorry for what you just witnessed. I got this feeling during the first five minutes of the latest crapfest unleashed to this undeserving world by Paul W.S. Anderson. What did we humans as a species do to deserve movies of such assfactor? What genocide did we skip over that we are now paying for? Which cute, cuddly, endangered species did we mercilessly throw into the wood chipper of extinction?

Let's see how much cash we can get out of having Milla scowl a lot.
It's no secret that Milla Jovovich is a gorgeous woman. There's no denying it and if you are a man, and you think otherwise, you obviously have a problem acknowledging the fact that you are a flaming homo. She is also a decent actress to boot, so it makes it all the more sadder to see that she is stuck with terrible, shitty movies like the Resident Evil franchise. As a series, it has been consistently awful, with things going downhill after the first movie, which was only passable. If there was ever a great candidate for film euthanasia, this is it. The Resident Evil games back in the glory days of Playstation were damn scary, thrilling, and fun as hell to play. It's a damn shame that such a cool series of games got shafted so badly but that's the truth and there's no hiding from it. 

Afterlife takes place sometime after the events of the previous film Extinction, which altogether means nothing since the story makes little sense anyways. The movie opens with one of the few decent scenes in the entire flick, with Alice (Milla Jovovich, as if you didn't know) and a bunch of her clones attack an Umbrella Corporation underground base. They break in after killing a metrick f*ckton of guards and chase after a douchebag wearing sunglasses even though he is a good twenty floors underground and it is nighttime. Because... he's baaaad, get it? Anyways, Alice has some superpowers, kills a lot of Japanese guys, then the baddie runs away in a snazzy tilt-rotor plane. Alice sneaks aboard, fights said bad guy, and gets her superpowers taken away from her. Immediately after this, the plane crashes into a mountain and Alice goes on to survive a MOTHERF*CKING PLANE CRASH without a single scratch. So much for no powers, right? Alice then has a jolly good time exploring the mostly dead planet Earth in search of survivors and of course, running into tons of vicious zombies.

The dude with the giant ax was pretty rad, I'll admit.
I had a hard time accepting just how bad this movie is. I tried to like it, I really did, and here's my reasoning. Zombie movies are a staple of the guy movie diet, right below destroying third world countries and white guys learning Asian martial arts, so it's painful to see zombie movies done badly. Afterlife just plain sucks, and it's blatantly obvious that this latest installment was just trying to milk as much cash as they could out of the gullible dumbasses who paid the $20 or so to watch this in 3D. The plot makes no sense whatsoever, and neither do most of the characters. There's about twenty different English accents used, for no apparent reason. Most of the action scenes are pointless and filled with gimmicky 3D objects flying towards you. Every ten seconds or so, the action turns into slow-motion - it's tired, cliched and just boring. I'm sorry, but even a guy movie has to be watchable.

I wear shades 24/7. Can you tell I am a bad man? CAN YOU?!?
TL;DR - You might as well spray yourself in the eyes with vinegar and then put on 3D glasses - 1.5/10

5 comments:

  1. Glad I didn't waste my money seeing this one then.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I hated this movie, and the entire saga of them as well. I could have taken the first one as a seperate story and been happy, but then they had to go add RE characters and make them completely worthless. As for Milla being a good actress......eh look at her IMDB and tell me that. One good movie, that being the fifth element. She is smoking hot though.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yeah I might've been a bit generous, but I might be biased because Fifth Element is such a cool flick.

    The whole series is more or less a trainwreck.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Another problem I had with the movie is the Slow Mo. FFS, thats all this movie was. I bet if they sped up all of the slow mo in this movie, it would be 30 minutes long.

    ReplyDelete
  5. they are all terrible, thanks hollywood...and honestly given the right director (aranofsky/nolan) and a decent writer they would make grade A horror/suspense

    ReplyDelete