Well, after all the hype... here it is. Where to begin?
There is PLENTY of ridiculous stuff to be found here--and Roger-Dodger beat me to a couple of the true doozies. But let's be fair--any of us would be perfectly capable of finding them on our own. I mean... imagine the church scene from Alice's perspective. "Hmm... here I am, riding my motorcycle. I'm passing a church. You know, I bet there's trouble going on in there. I think I'd better jump my motorcycle THROUGH A STAINED GLASS WINDOW... just in case!!!"
Oh, and Nemesis? Sorry your name didn't make the title--probably because STAR TREK beat you to it, right? But it's nice to see Chatterer the Cenobite get his own co-starring role. So much for design. And yeah--why does the super-fighting-force blast away at his body armor and not ONCE aim for his head? Sure--maybe he has bulletproof leather skin around his skull, too, but at least AIM for it once just to prove it?
And yet... and yet... it's still a lot of fun, and that's where I leave Roger behind (yet again). It DOES connect properly from the first film, it does proceed in a believable direction from there, and I've seen FAR more boring zombies in action. Not to beat a dead horse (or an undead dog), but there are significantly lower watermarks in the zombie-film-based-on-a-video-game sweepstakes. Sure, there are some cheesy characters (not to mention non-entities who get eaten before we even learn their NAMES) and plenty of predictable "oh, here's where the zombie jumps out" bits. On the other hand, there's one hell of a jump early on which has nothing to do with a zombie attack! It's not entirely bloodless, either--but sorry, still no graphic flesh-munching. But you DO get Milla Jovovich as Alice again. (I still haven't seen either TOMB RAIDER movie.)
Pity the film itself made no use of the trailer material with the phony cosmetic commercial or the product line it was supposedly introducing. Something tells me CATWOMAN had something to do with that! The DVD might contain some interesting deleted scenes...
And finally... pity me if you must... but when they finally hit the ending of this installment, I actually found myself willing to sit through another! Good grief, this is hardly award-winning script material, but I was genuinely interested in what was going to happen next! (Perhaps game players already know? I have no experience here and have no idea how faithful the movies are to the game concepts.)
Alexander Witt certainly knows how to keep things moving and visually interesting as a director... as for Anderson? I'd rather see him keeping an even keel here than something I admire as much as the ALIEN franchise down to a similar video game level.
Profundity? No. Just plain fun? Sure, why not?
