Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil was a deliciously over-the-top orgy of zombie madness and female fearlessness headlined by Milla Jovovich’s ax-wielding warrior babe Alice. The entertainingly inane film mixed grisly gore with red-hot eroticism—Milla’s low-cut dress and black boots were integral to the monster-mashing mayhem—and a degree of paranoia centered around the Umbrella Corporation’s creation of the cadaver-reanimating T-virus in an underground facility called the Hive. Yet for all its pleasures, the film was only incidentally related to its bleak, chilling source material, a faux pas remedied by Alexander Witt’s equally excessive, idiotic, and enjoyable follow-up Resident Evil: Apocalypse.
After quickly synopsizing the original’s events, Witt’s rambunctious sequel kicks into high gear as Alice, seemingly imbued with superhuman powers by the Umbrella Corporation’s experiments, takes to the chaotic, zombie-filled streets of Raccoon City in an effort to thwart the undead menace. The city is under an Umbrella-mandated quarantine that’s trapped uninfected citizens with the rabid, swarming creatures, and though this setting exhibits none of its predecessor’s claustrophobic, cold-steel creepiness, Witt drenches his depravity in jet-black griminess that’s reminiscent of the video games’ eerily decayed environments.
Written by Anderson, the film’s splintered narrative focuses not only on Alice’s plight but also on the survival tactics of Oded Fehr’s S.T.A.R.S. soldier Olivera, Mike Epps’s comedic relief hustler L.J., and Sienna Guillory’s game-derived police officer Jill Valentine, whose assured ass-kicking and revealing outfit marks her as a kindred spirit to the fishnet shirt-adorned Alice. When it comes to zombie-killing pandemonium, Anderson and Witt wisely recognize that two sizzling hot, partially dressed badasses are invariably better than one.
Apocalypse offers a staggering litany of junky, lunatic moments throughout, from Alice sprinting down the face of a skyscraper and engaging in a battle of the T-virus titans against the über-monster Nemesis to our heroes’ stupefying decision to walk through a graveyard during a zombie outbreak. Yet the rollicking film’s comically outrageous set pieces, familiar flesh-eating fiends (including the long-tongued Lickers), and disinterest in nuanced character development are hardly detriments, since this superficial broads-and-bullets extravaganza deliberately, and quite proudly, wears its stupidity on its bloodstained sleeve.
Jovovich’s sultry intensity, the adrenalized techno-metal score, and plentiful allusions to the first film—in a subplot involving a crippled Umbrella scientist’s (Jared Harris) missing daughter, the little girl’s soft British accent subtly reveals her father’s culpability in the catastrophe—all help to prop up the frighteningly emaciated story, and Witt’s go-for-broke action choreography exhibits a head-snapping muscularity. Much like its legion of cannibalistic corpses, Apocalypse may be brain dead, but it’s also heartily, feverishly alive.
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