RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE

Video games can be highly entertaining. However, for people with lousy hand/eye coordination, they can be a massive bummer, as the onscreen alter ego dies and the game refuses to progress to the next level. RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE poses one solution to this problem, as it largely feels like a video game that is in auto-play mode. In a way, this isn't very surprising, as the film, like its 2002 predecessor, is based on a video game. The difference is that the original managed to feel like a movie, despite its origins, whereas APOCALYPSE seems much more firmly rooted in providing game-style action.

APOCALYPSE essentially begins where its predecessor ends, though it provides a bit of backstory. Alice (Milla Jovovich), who in the first film blasted her way out of a subterranean research facility overrun with flesh-eating zombies and mutant monsters, only to wake up in an abandoned laboratory after all hell has already broken loose in Raccoon City. The evil and hugely powerful Umbrella Corporation has totally lost control of the town, which is filling up with ravenous walking corpses and their soon to be dead/reanimated victims. The corporation seals the city gates, trapping the living inside with the undead. Alice eventually crosses paths with a plucky cop (Sienna Guillory), a Special Forces operative (Oded Fehr) and his crew, a TV reporter (Sandrine Holt) and a street huckster (Mike Epps), who are searching for a lost little girl (Sophie Vavasseur), whose scientist father (Jared Harris) offers the group a way out if they can rescue his daughter. Alice discovers that her trip to the lab has given her a number of interesting new abilities ...

Alice, in fact, now can kick, punch, run and shoot exactly like a video game character rather than in the manner of the normal humans around her. Despite the horror movie trappings, the emphasis on Alice's superhuman feats tilts APOCALYPSE more toward action than horror, though director Alexander Witt does stage a few good jump scares. He might have staged even more if it were not for the bewilderingly dark visuals there are scenes where it's extremely difficult to make out what's going on and hyperactive editing, One would suspect a hasty cut to avoid an R rating, but the movie still has one of those, so the relative squeamishness (considering the subject matter) seems even more absurd than usual. This said, Witt keeps the pace hopping and screenwriter Paul W.S. Anderson (who directed the earlier installment) gives us a reasonable amount of varied incident.

APOCALYPSE does have something of the feel of a video game. When we enter a new environment, the characters take a few moments to get acclimated, then make a decision look up, look down, touch someone that triggers a bout of action. When Alice joins the fray, with her spinning kicks and sure shooting, it feels more like game activity than ever.

Jovovich is very comfortable playing the worried yet heroic Alice and Fehr sells his character's tough yet human confidence. The dialogue tends to be a bit on the nose, but it's serviceable.

If you need a zombie movie, RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE is not the best of the recent batch. If, however, you need a bigscreen living dead experience right now, this acceptably fills the bill.