Oh, it's evil all right.
Right off the bat: This movie is bad. Really bad. Really, really bad. So bad I can't tell you how it ends, because I left. The movie was free, my schedule was clear, and I walked out.
Not that any video game movie has been good. They have long been the bastard children of Nintendo and Hollywood, and for good reason: most games are direct rip-offs of movie plotlines or ridiculous concepts that are but clothesline for action, adventure and so forth. Shoot the spaceship, slice the monster, save the girl, eat the mushroom and spit fireballs, etcetera. To try to make a movie out of these ideas is either a) ludicrous (Super Mario Brothers, Street Fighter) or b) a rip off of a rip off of a rip off (Tomb Raider, Wing Comm ander). Only Mortal Kombat halfway worked, because its plot was no more ridiculous than most kung-fu movies.
Resident Evil, the video game, was not scary because of the story. A haunted house, zombies, Doberman pinchers from hell, evil corporation... blah. (Well, okay, Doberman pinchers from hell are a little scary.) What made the game work was that it was you in these predictable situations. You were the one opening the doors, investigating the things going bump in the dark basements, shooting the zombies back to hell. That and an eerie silence made up for a great game.
In transition from Playstation to big screen, the zombie has died on the table. Things look suitably intense at first, if in a melodramatic, eardrum-shattering way. Cue the Marilyn Manson techno-rock score (no, really) and we are at The Hive, an appropriately named laboratory of evil. We see the eeevil corporation, with it's eeevil workers, including the eeevil guy with coffee spilled on his shirt who franticly screams, "We have to get out of here!," until everyone wants him to be the first to go. No worries, as the pesky AI program called "Red Queen" decides to kill everyone. (Even James Bond villains know not to give control of their deadly defense mechanisms to machines.) Actually, this part is kind of scary, especially when eeevil plucky coworker number two gets her head stuck between the hallway and the falling elevator.
Suddenly, we are in a creepy mansion and hello, here's Milla Jovinavich, lying naked on a shower floor (Her one acting note during the entire movie appears to have been "don't.") She puts on a red dress and begins to wander the mansion, when a swat team busts in through the window and the techno/horror music starts pounding even louder. This music does not stop, effectively killing all suspense and causing your eardrums to bleed. I like my dumb action movies loud, but when typing in a number has the same decibel level as a zombie massacre...
The swat team is led by a man, One (Colin Salmon), who is so mysterious that I had to look his name up in the Press Kit. He is the most robotic actor alive, so much so that I have affectionately dubbed him "Mr Roboto." He is joined by Rain (Michelle Rodriguez) - I can only imagine her acting note was to snarl a lot. There are a bunch of other swat team members, but who cares? They all die within minutes. They are also joined by two random guys who manage to survive the first round of cast executions, and one of them kind of looked like Hugh Jackman. That's about all I remember of them. The rest is the horrible, horrible editing and soundtrack.
Oh, and the script. The dialogue from this point on is spoken only in one sentence, declarative barks like "Keep it tight!" or "Move it!" or "They're too many of them!" or "I said keep it tight!" There is the one hilarious exception when Milla Jovinavich, on behalf of a room full of confused audience members, asks Mr. Roboto "What's going on here?" Mr. Roboto launches into a monotone monologue explaining away what has been a completely incoherent opening 30 minutes, complete with a crappy 3-D visual that shows exactly where they are in the base. The only reason I can think of for this is that the producers, seeing how horrible it was turning out, wanted to give the audience some way to figure out what was going on.
Then Mr. Roboto, along with most of the swat team, gets cubed. This is an interesting process by which a laser slices them up in a hallway. It sounds cool, but is in fact stupid. The critics to my left groaned as one nameless Swat team member lost her head, while the drunk moviegoers to my right screamed, "No blood spurt? Where's the blood spurt?!" Mr. Roboto strikes a kung fu pose, apparently in an attempt to intimidate the laser, and the laser responds by becoming a waffle pattern and slicing him into little cubes. We are again spared the blood spurt, but none of the stupidity.
The movie from this point degenerates even further, with an evil computer hologram, a crowd of stupid looking zombies, the subsequent badly-created action sequence with the survivors pumping bullets into the zombies (again no blood spurt), the return of the evil coffee guy as a zombie, and the further munching of everyone that doesn't have star billing or look like Hugh Jackman. "We've got to get out of here!" was said many times more. At some point, when the zombies were pounding on the doors and Michelle Rodriguez was snarling at them, I realized I didn't care in the slightest how the movie would end. Neither did anyone I brought with me on this sad, sad trip to hell. So out the door, on the T and home we went.
The whole movie reeks of the most awful compromise a film can make: all the pretense and seriousness of a thriller, all the luridness and promise of trash, without actually delivering either of the goods. If you want to make a redeemable horror movie, you have to surprise a jaded audience. Try having a scary moment without the music telegraphing it a million miles away. Try having real characters that we care about. Try not having the characters go searching for the thing going bump in the basement. Often what we don't see is scarier than what we do. Alien knew this, as did Halloween, The Shining and The Sixth Sense.
But if you're going to make a balls to the wall zombie/alien horror movie, go for it - give us the guns, the gear, the buckets of gore, the slaughter, the hammy acting, the one-liners. Give us the blood spurt. Don't try to pass it off with artsy editing or effects. Evil Dead II and Alien may have been trash, but they had energy and the courage of their convictions. Even House on Haunted Hill had the decency to give us an over the top Geoffery Rush and Chris Kattan dying a horrible death. The actors in Resident Evil look like they had to choose between making this movie or cleaning thirty miles of highway with their tongues. Then they had second thoughts.Technically I can't call it the worst film I've ever seen, as I only saw 70 of the total 100 minutes. Maybe the last 30 minutes completely redeem everything that happened before. Maybe they make it even worse than a Kevin Costner movie. Frankly, there's things going bump in the basement, and we've got to get out of here.
