It isn't very often that I find myself regretting a decision I've made. Watching 'Resident Evil' (2002) is one of those decisions. It wasn't immediate regret. Although I felt that 'Resident Evil' was pretty crap, it was fun crap and I quite enjoyed watching it on the whole. The regret of watching it came after I had finished watching 'Resident Evil: Apocalypse' (2004) and realised that by watching and reviewing 'Resident Evil' I had committed to watching and reviewing this garbage series of films. Pray for me. 'Resident Evil' Apocalypse' picks up immediately after the first film with the T-Virus now infecting the whole of Raccoon City. The Umbrella Corporation have evacuated their most valuable staff members and have put the rest of the city into lockdown in order to test the Nemesis Programme. However, one of the Umbrella scientist's daughter is stuck in the city. He is able to contact a group of Umbrella soldiers who have been left for dead, and Alice (Milla Jovovich) to ask them to find his daughter in return for a route out of the city. There challenge is made harder by the oncoming zombie hoard, the unstoppable Nemesis on their tail and the threat of a nuclear bomb on its way to flatten the city.
Let's not beat around the bush, this film is fucking terrible. It truly is awful. It is the director's only credit and I can only be thankful for that. It doesn't improve on any aspect of the first, and seeing as the first film isn't exactly a marvel of filmmaking that is pretty unforgivable. Actually, that's not fair. The CGI in this film is better. Its still not great but it is better. Other than that it is all down hill. It started promising. The first twenty minutes had a handful of ridiculous action scenes which I got a good chuckle out of. But the further the film went the less frequent these moments got and with a narrative as shit as the one in this film having less stupid moments really, really harms it. Its not just the narrative that is terrible though, it is the writing overall. The first 40 minutes of the film have literally no narrative thread. It is literally 40 minutes of moments happening to characters who we know nothing about (often times I didn't even know their names) with nothing holding them together. Stuff is set up for the eventual arrival of the plot, but it is lost within so much pointless shit that you forget it even happened. That is probably why when the plot does finally kick off it is done so through a big exposition dump. The dialogue was equally terrible, but often times this landed the funny side of terrible so it gets more of a pass. The worst aspect of this film is it's editing. Holy shit I haven't seen editing this bad in a very long time. It does the typical shit action film trope of replacing actually well shot and choreographed action with a thousand quick cuts so that you have no idea what is happening and the filmmakers just hope that you think you saw something really cool. This is a problem in a lot of action films, and this one is no exception. But that is not the end of the torrid editing in this film. This film seems to think that continuity editing doesn't matter and so we end up with whole sequences where characters bounce around magically appearing in places with no explanation. But the worst aspect of the editing is this god awful slow mo blur they repeatedly use. Why? It looks shit. My only thought is that they were embarrassed about what the film actually looked like so thought they would throw an ungodly amount of blur on it to cover it up. Truly terrible.
Now we come to the acting and holy hell is it abysmal. It is probably, overall, the worst acting I have seen in any of the films I have reviewed for this lockdown, bar 'The Quarantine Hauntings' (2015) which was a ridiculously low budget horror film with no name actors. Milla Jovovich kind of gets away with it as Alice. I don't think her performance is good but her character has been injected with the T-Virus and so has become less human, so her lack of emotion is kind of in character. The rest of the cast don't have this excuse. You could easily have replaced every single actor with a robot and you would have got the same amount of emotion. And yet, even among the shit there are people to pick out. Sienna Guillory is terrible playing Jill Valentine. She is so wooden and lifeless, and every line she speaks sounds like she is reading it off a cue card. At least she managed to cry, so there's that. Speaking of wooden and lifeless step forward Oded Fehr as Carlos Olivera. This guy shows zero emotion throughout the film and I don't think he uses a single muscle in his face. The zombies look more alive than him. And then we come to the MVP of shit, Zack Ward as Nicholai Ginovaeff. This man was a laugh a minute. Not one single line of dialogue sounded real. It wasn't Tommy Wiseau levels of bad delivery but it was close, and god I lapped it up.
I came into 'Resident Evil: Apocalypse' hoping for more of the same ridiculous fun from the first one, and during the first twenty minutes I thought I was going to get that. But I soon realized that I had fallen into a trap. This film is horrible. It has horrible acting, a horrible narrative and some of the worst editing I have seen in any film ever. It does have some so bad its good moments, by they are few and far between and are totally outweighed by the huge amount of shit surrounding it. Don't waste your time with this one. As for me I am committed now and there are three more of these films to watch. I hope my brain survives the onslaught of crap it is about to endure.