Video games have a pretty wretched history of being transferred to the screen, so nobody expected "Resident Evil" to be anything but a lame cash-in. Well, life's full of surprises.
"Resident Evil" is a decent film. It's no classic, but it's a fun piece of full-speed-ahead action and, while essentially a sci-fi narrative, it has more effective supernatural shenanigans than several recent films combined.
The plot, loosely based on the game, involves a virus that's let loose in an underground research laboratory, forcing the computer to seal it off and kill everyone inside.
It doesn't quite manage to kill everyone, though. This virus has a side effect of resurrecting people into brainless, flesh-hungry zombies.
A crack team of soldiers is sent down to investigate what happened, and the secrets surrounding the accident are gradually revealed.
"Patton" it ain't, but it's refreshing to see zombies up on the big screen, where they belong. The world hasn't had a truly great zombie film in theaters since George A. Romero's 1985 conclusion to his "Living Dead" trilogy, "Day of the Dead."
The "Resident Evil" games owe almost everything to Romero - he was even slated to direct this project at one point. It's a shame he didn't get to do it, but Paul W.S. Anderson handles the task just fine.
Anderson is responsible for the lame "Mortal Kombat" movie but, to his credit, he also gave the world the unnervingly creepy "Event Horizon." "Evil" falls in the "Event" category as an intense, all-out assault on the viewer. The tension builds nicely in some elaborate scenes, the suspense remains reasonably high throughout and there are some very memorable setpieces.
When the zombies first come back to life and surround the humans, the ensuing fight is effective. From that point on, the action continues through to the end of the film.
The laser room is another scene audiences won't soon forget. Although the violence is pretty subdued in this particular sequence, lasers tear apart several characters while at the same time they all contort themselves and do acrobatics.
As for the scene's lack of violence, the same is true for most of the film. Zombies get blown away relentlessly, the undead have a few human feasts and a giant mutated creature on the loose wreaks havoc, but the bloodshed doesn't linger. Stuff happens, and it's on with the show.
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It's probably better to handle it this way. Fans of the game probably will be shouting for "more blood!" (I certainly heard some teenage audience members say "That's it?" after a few relatively bloodless killings), but the film just can't spill as much grue as the game. Film is a radically different medium and the MPAA is a lot more restrictive than video game raters about what can be shown.
But as far as restrictions go, Milla Jovovich's partial nudity should start getting its own credit in her films. Ever since "The Fifth Element," it seems an absolute necessity that she remain in partial states of undress or in revealing clothes for her film's entire running time. The three 12-year-olds sitting next to us seemed to get a kick out of it, but this woman should definitely get a "no more partial nudity" clause in her contract before she gets typecast as the "partially barenaked lady."
Clothes aside, her performance is fine. All around, the actors pull off their characters with suitable intensity. This isn't a dramatic ensemble film; it's a zombie monster mash. The humans are in it to make stuff happen and react to it. They serve their purpose.
The effects mix old-fashioned mechanics and prosthetics with modern computer-generated imagery. The movie strikes a fair balance between the two, and the computer effects only look terribly fake about half the time.
"Resident Evil" isn't the greatest, but it's a solid piece of genre filmmaking with plenty of thrills and spills for the kids who see it (unaccompanied by a parent or legal guardian, of course).
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