Has Alexander Witt ever actually played one of the damn games he is merrily butchering for our ‘enjoyment’? I had trouble keeping track of the contradictions and mistakes in the ‘plot’ with regard to the game timeline. So much trouble, in fact, that eventually I just gave up and tried to enjoy the movie in its own right. Sadly, even that was impossible!See, this movie has absolutely nothing going for it. There is no atmosphere, little plot (they felt the need to dumb down the plot of the game. Lets just make sure you understand what an insult this is; they felt the need to DUMB DOWN A COMPUTER GAME so that you wouldn’t get lost) and no event is less than totally predictable from at least twenty minutes earlier. Actually, that is a lie; there are at least two surprises that you don’t see coming, but not because of skilled directing, merely because you simply could not imagine that Witt would be THAT disrespectful to the source material.
The script is the clunkiest thing to fall out of Paul Anderson’s arse for a long time. Not that quality really matters as no one on the billing has the acting skills required to make even ‘There’s nothing to it, just aim for the head’ sound vaguely plausible, let alone believable. Whilst the first’s zombies had the kind of staggering menace about them that all good zombies should, this instalment seemed full of hungover students going to a nine o’clock lecture (save for the moments when they gain inexplicable martial arts skill).
These criticisms are the ones that you will notice most if you have never played the games. God help you if you have, as Witt’s decision to spend ninety minutes pissing on the franchise from a great height will drive you insane. Characters appear out of nowhere from the other instalments (regardless of the fact that they never met any of the players in this movie, and should actually be dead), others change their allegiances for no reason other than there would have to be a plot to explain why they were not good guys. The whole ‘science gone wrong’ angle gets thrown out the window when psychic elements get brought in for no reason and, most gallingly, Nemesis has a crisis of conscience! I don’t remember the power of unconditional love saving me from being obliterated in the game.
Even if you could ignore the mistakes, you can only watch in horror as chance after chance for a set piece or at least subtle nod towards the game gets passed over in favour of sequences robbed from Jurassic Park. It is entirely devoid of pretty much anything that makes this part of the Resident Evil universe other than the absolute sketchiest of plot details. If you’re going to botch up an action movie (and let there be no doubt, this is a boring mess of a botch job), the least you should do is keep the fanboys happy; they’re the only ones who will buy the Special Platinum Edition DVD release you have planned.This is a boring waste of time that is quite obviously the product of a crew who should really know better. In more ways than one.
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