Third entry in the increasingly tiresome series no longer resembles its video game roots; director Russell Mulcahy (of Highlander fame) has instead brought to the film a post-apocalyptic mixture of The Road Warrior and Romero´s Day of the Dead, where long, dull, desert-roaming sequences are punctuated by brief zombie-action interludes.
Milla Jovovich returns as Alice, one-dimensional heroine who is now developing telekinetic superpowers (newcomers to the series will be lost here) and wandering the Nevada landscape while evading the omnipresent eyes of Umbrella Corp. and Dr. Isaacs, who are attempting to synthesize a cure for the zombie virus from her blood.
This results in bizarre scenes featuring a multitude of Jovovich clones, often unintentionally…strange, whether they´re piled in mass graves like genocide victims or suspended nude in giant spheres of water like fetuses in robotic wombs.
It´s all nicely filmed, with lingering widescreen cinematography covering the vast deserts and a stark production design (by Eugenio Caballero, who won an Oscar for Pan´s Labyrinth) but it´s rather sloppily put together by Mulcahy, who never involves us in the story (what little story there is) or the characters, who were (in all seriousness) better defined in the video games.
Look out for Spencer Locke´s soon-to-be classic “they call me K-Mart” speech.
Written by the director & writer of the first film, Paul W. S. Anderson, who must really like that laser grid booby trap – it´s used again here in two key scenes.
As bad as it is, pic is no worse than the previous entry.
