Don’t let the majority of America’s critics fool you. Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a genre fan’s feast. A delectable Milla Jovovich returns in this action-packed sequel to Resident Evil (2002), a glossy B-movie based on the popular Resident Evil video game series. It’s non-stop, over-the-top zombie blasting, martial arts smacking goodness with scantily-clad babes and big guns. I might as well just stop here….but I won’t.

Mortal Kombat director Paul W.S. Anderson helmed the first Resident Evil, but turned the directing reins over to cinematographer and second unit director Alexander Witt, a man with experience shooting good action movies like The Bourne Identity (2002) and Pirates of the Caribbean (2003). He certainly does a bang up job here.

Anderson’s script loosely follows Resident Evil II, the video game. Alice (Milla Jovovich), former head of security at the Umbrella Corporation’s bio-chemical weapons research facility has survived her previous encounter with reanimated dead infected with the deadly T-virus, only to wake up in Raccoon City to find that the virus has spread throughout the city. The corporation has walled off the entire city where hordes of zombies hunt down the remaining survivors in the streets. Alice quickly discovers that she has also been infected, but instead of degenerating into a zombie, she has gotten stronger. She eventually joins police detective Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) and several S.T.A.R.S. members (tactical security forces) as they hunt for the daughter of an Umbrella researcher and attempt to get out of the city alive. Aside from a vicious Umbrella executive, their main obstacle is a mutated super soldier with really big guns. The story reaches Return of the Living Dead proportions by the end, but it doesn’t stop there and leaves us with a handy lead-in to the next installment.

Keep in mind that the film is based on a video game here. There’s no reason to get hung up on what is complete fantasy geared to entertain and not provide a mental challenge. However, a big budget B-movie does tend to raise expectations beyond the likes of Cyborg (1989). Apocalypse gets it right in a number of ways. The video game connection is fairly strong and fans of the series should be happy. Characters, costumes, various sets, and the gunplay all bare similarities to the series in look. As someone who voraciously devoured the first three games in the series, a shot of an ornate and claustrophobic study or Jill Valentine’s fetching blue and black ensemble brought back fond memories of hoping the four remaining slugs in my .357 Magnum would be enough to get through the next roomful of rotting Dobermans (they’re also in the film).

As a zombie movie, Apocalypse isn’t very scary, although it has its moments. Zombie kids and corpses that crawl out from under tables are definitely on my freaky list. It also lacks the humor and satire that exists in so many other zombie flicks. The main attraction is the action, which gets a big boost over the previous film. As a genetically enhanced human, Alice is performing a lot of crazy moves like jumping a motorcycle through a stained-glass window, blasting away with her shotgun while sliding into a laundry chute or delivering a series of bone-crushing martial arts moves to zombies freshly risen from their graves. It’s really absurd and gets more so as the film goes on, but what fun it is. There’s actually a fair amount of martial arts action in the Blade tradition. If you’ve ever fantasized about competent screen fighters dropping pesky brain eaters (I do all the time), then you’re in luck.

The massive super soldier that Alice battles is modeled after the vein-covered monstrosity that emerges in the video game to be the end boss. They throw in a nice little character twist with this version, while the monster himself looks more like something out of another classic video game, Doom. Regardless, it’s pretty entertaining to see a gruesome Frankenstein’s monster lumbering through city streets infested with zombies, blasting away at our heroes with a chain gun and rocket launcher.

Milla Jovovich is shaping up to be quite the action heroine with this series and her following work in Ultraviolet. Her male fans won’t be disappointed with the modest assets she brings to Apocalypse. None of the acting is great, but it doesn’t matter. In fact, I would have been disappointed had it been better. Apocalypse is B-movie material at its pricy heart and needs to adhere to the genre’s rules. What it lacks in what mainstream critics would consider pluses, it more than makes up for in excessive violence, gratuitous female exposure and relentless zombies en masse. That my friends is quality entertainment of the lowest order. If I could sum it all up in two words, they’d be, “itchy….tasty….”

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