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Russell Mulcahy, Resident Evil: Extinction

by Chris Flippo
09/22/2007

You want to know a little secret about movie critics? They love to do articles on bad movies. After sitting through hours and hours of high-brow European films about social classes, politics, teen angst, and drug addiction, its fun to sit back and watch a bad movie and make fun of it, MST3K-style. Resident Evil: Extinction is bad, but it's not bad enough to achieve the degree of awfulness required to make it fun. Its middle-of-the-road bad, somewhere between failed ambition and Battlefield Earth.

As the story picks up, the deadly T-Virus from the past two movies has escaped quarantine and has devastated the planet. Now, the world is a wasteland and zombies cruise the landscape looking for people to eat (which might be difficult to do in a wasteland). Cue our heroine from the last two movies, Alice (Milla Jovovich), who is also roaming the countryside, but is certainly not looking for food. She meets up with a caravan headed by Claire (Ali Larter) and Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr). Together they come up with a plan to go to Alaska, which is safe because it is “isolated.” Apparently, the infection is scared of Canada.

Yes, it seems the entire world has been run down by the infection. Crows have now become Zombie Crows. Dogs have now become Zombie Dogs. Come to think of it, a pretty interesting movie might have been made from the guy who first discovered his dog was turning into a zombie. Imagine Old Yeller meets Dawn of the Dead. As for the crows, I have to give credit where credit is due. They’ve managed to rip off Romero and Hitchcock with a single brush stroke. Not just any hack can do that. Its takes a good hack.

Well, as you can probably now tell, it’s a hard movie to take seriously. It has every cliche in the zombie movie playbook, which means, yes, someone gets bitten and keeps it a secret from the other characters. Maybe it would have worked if it had played with these conventions, but the film is too dutiful. Having said this, God help me, I was kind of rooting for it. As the sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a video game, the odds were stacked against this one from the beginning. Probably nobody was expecting this movie to be good. It's not, but what if it had been? My bet is that the universe would have imploded on itself.

Now, with that out of my system, I’ll tell you what is good. Resident Evil: Extinction has a surprising sense of finality. Sure, it’s all a set-up for another sequel, but for awhile, the movie does manage to make us believe it might be the end. Oh, and I admire the fact that they took each sequel into a new direction. Sure, its ripping off The Road Warrior, but at least the franchise has moved beyond the facility that was featured in the first movie. While they may not be getting better, these movies are certainly getting bigger.

Sorry, gamers. Resident Evil: Extinction is not the movie that will buck the trend in lame video game adaptations. Teenage boys may like it while they are watching it, but it will be forgotten before we get a Resident Evil 4. My advice? Go rent a Romero film. They’re fun, well-made, and, afterwards, you’ll still be able to look at yourself in a mirror.

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