Resident Evil: Apocalypse ~ 2004, Alexander Witt (written by Paul W.S. Anderson- Boo!)
What happens when you take a step down from terrible? Sometimes it seems like it would just be easier to make a good movie. Have we not yet hit rock bottom? Is it even possible to make a worse movie than we are already used to?! Today; the race to be the biggest idiot possible is a dangerous, fast paced, highly competitive arena. Trend setters in every avenue of the human experience anxiously push the limits of how stupid they can be, and no other field of human accomplishment shows as much innovation, or as much tireless zest.
In film, this competition is especially fierce. Titans of incompetence like James Nguyen, Tommy Wiseau, and Michael Bay loom formidably in the distance, unreachable points on the horizon. Yet, even now, courageous idiots dauntlessly strive to reach new levels of ineptitude. Take Alexander Witt, director of Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Just as Paul W.S. Anderson had established himself as a rampaging juggernaut of utter tripe, Witt steps up to the plate and boldly agrees to follow in Anderson’s footsteps with a sequel to Resident Evil. In so doing, he somehow manages to craft a film which is stupid in striking, unexpected new ways. Now, Witt joins with Paul W.S. Anderson and company, themselves the NASA of stupid bullshit, on a quest to dumb down the human race to the utmost of their abilities. Nobody else can suck as reliably, and with such fevered enthusiasm as these guys can. They are truly pioneers on the very boundary of what we as humans dream we can achieve.
THE PLOT~ Following the events of Resident Evil, zombies have infested Racoon City. A number of adults of bellow average intelligence fight to escape, including:
1. Alice- Milla Jovovich’s character. She’s horrible. Who cares? She ends up being a mutant.
2. Some mercenaries- Whatever.
3. A super racist portrayal of a black man – “Please, mutha fucka, my shit is custom!” (When we meet this guy he is literally handcuffed to a zombified prostitute.)
4. Another LESS cartoonish black man, so this way we can say “See, not all black people in this movie are criminals, this black guy is a cop! This movie isn’t racist!” But it totally is still super racist.
5. Other assholes
6. A little girl with an English accent
This turkey does ONE thing right where the first movie couldn’t- we have a lot more zombies this time around. That having been said, they aren’t particularly interesting or well done, and Witt keeps filming them in a blurry, low frame rate smear, which I guess is supposed to be cool? Or scary? Really sucks. Looks cheap, it’s a terrible technique. Otherwise, the production is fine, but the acting isn’t anything to write home about. Scut Farkus is especially bad.
Yes, you get to watch the bully from A Christmas Story die, so I guess that’s a plus.
The biggest problem here is that all of the characters are idiots. They make decisions that only a child could believe a capable adult would make. For instance:
Quick; you’re a cop, there’s an outbreak of a deadly virus in your city, what do you do?!?
If you answered “Charge into a crowded police station and open fire on suspects in custody while numerous innocent civilians and police stand in your line of fire without any explanation, and refuse to even warn people with a “Heads up,” and then act like a total dick when they react to your behavior,” then you are a moron, and you’re probably going to get your face shot off your fucking head. That’s the bad news. The good news is, you might like Resident Evil: Apocalypse, because that’s just the sort of thing that our characters do in this movie. Jill, one of our characters, does this exact thing, in fact. When asked what the hell she is doing, she responds curtly “They’re infected.” …Okay. Well, that’s your opinion… Totally uncool for you to just shoot people like that. Also, you could have easily killed someone who WASN’T “infected.” We’re cops and you don’t get to just shoot people because you think you know what’s going on. You’re a shitty character, and you’re stupid.
That’s not the only ridiculous, imbecilic action committed by a character in this movie, pretty much anything anyone does is stupid, Alice’s antics in the church sequence jump to mind, but that’s what we get when our writer, and likely our director, aren’t very smart, and aren’t any good at what they do. Resident Evil: Apocalypse is really, really shitty.
One thing that happens in Resident Evil: Whichever one this is called which I think is especially depressing; at one point, Alice realizes she is being watched through a video surveillance camera, and she uses her crazy mental powers to actually sense the person watching her, where ever that person might be in the world, and then kill that person, Michael Ironside style. The implications here are nothing to sneeze at, either her weird, biological powers allow her to somehow “hack in” to electronic circuits and trace the outgoing signal to whichever monitor it is routed to, and then somehow read the viewer, and somehow kill that person, making her powers both biological and technological, OR she is basically a god at this point. And that’s a far cry from the bumbling, remedial Jedi you’ll see her present herself as in the next movie. The reason for this is simple; the people who make these movies are idiots. They want the end of every movie to be epic, but then they regret how little room they’ve left for themselves to grow when the next sequel begins, so they try to retcon a decent chunk of what they’ve just finished doing every time the next installment kicks off. Watch, they do this over and over.
Also, the next one is even worse.
F
