Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D

0 5

Zombies and Black Pleather for Video Game Fans

Reviewed by Rebecca Wilson

on Tue, Sep 21 2010

A certain portion of the population, many of whom are female, have had the experience of sitting, bored out of their minds, next to friends, significant others and siblings who are playing video games. Occasionally, the play will stop and the characters will have conversations with each other to give instructions, share information and generally move the story along. This is slightly more interesting for the spectator and slightly less so for the player.

See / Skip

See it if:

You like videogames

You like someone who likes videogames

Milla Jovavich running around in shiny black leather sounds like 97 minutes well spent

Skip it if:

You like character development; also, dialogue

Sitting through one more videogame, er, movie sounds torturous

You’re pretty sure you’ll get cooties sitting in a theater with that many boys

This is also what watching Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D is like, except that it lasts for much longer.

Alice (Milla Jovavich) is back and humorless as ever as she battles the nefarious Umbrella Corporation and joins forces with a small band of survivors in a Los Angeles prison, which is surrounded (obviously) by the undead. They are all curious about mysterious rescue broadcasts they have heard.

Hopes are dashed.

Alice takes a shower.

They escape into the sewer.

Along the way, there is a lot of senseless slowing of motions and freezing of frames, for the benefit of 3-D. And possibly to make it seem more like a video game. However, the music, which sounds like synth-pop out of a can, is definitely inferior to that of many actual video games.

That this is the fourth installment of the Resident Evil franchise, and that this film grossed more than $90 million in its first week, is testament to the purchasing power of teenage boys and their more mature counterparts.