I had started out last week with the intention of covering all five movies that I took in during my movie marathon a couple of weekends ago, but if you read the column you know that it ended up that Eastern Promises and 3:10 to Yuma both had so much to offer that in writing about them I kind of went overboard, but I still had three movies to talk about, so here we are. Now before I get started, I kind of wanted to get some thing off my chest. I don’t do this often, so bare with me.
So the news came in this week that McG just got the job directing Terminator 4. At first, to be honest I met this with mild apathy. Nothing McG does in this film can really take away from the awesomeness of Cameron’s first two movies. I think Terminator 3 is actually a really fun movie to watch and has some pretty terrific action sequences, even if it doesn’t have the epic gravitas of its predecessor or the manic creative energy of the first film. In short, the McG/T4 news was really a non-issue with me.
Well it kind of became an issue on Friday, when I heard that Len Wiseman was let go of directing the Escape from New York remake in favor of BRETT RATNER. When will the madness stop people? How do these two keep getting work? How is it that real talent is out there struggling to get movies made and studios are throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at these two directors? How do we go from these franchises featuring James Cameron and John Carperter to these two Hollywood yes men? These aren’t even movies that need to be made at all, much less with these guys in charge. I expect we’re going to get news that Paul W.S. Anderson is doing a sequel to Fargo and Uwe Boll is planning a remake of Suspiria at any moment. Ok, end of rant.
Back to the column at hand, and the pain I was about to endure at the hands of my friend Robert, who insisted that we see four movies on this particular Saturday, after I had already see Eastern Promises the night before. On the bright side, with him choosing the films, I am not liable for the choices of films that we did see. For the rest of the day, we sat through two horrible films, one boring, one unintelligible, and then finished up with one of the best Action films of the year.
Resident Evil: Extinction Starring Milla Jovovich, Oded Fehr, Ali Larter, Iain Glen. Directed by Russell Mulcahy
Well, I can’t say I had a lot of hope for this one. My buddy is a huge Milla Jovovich fan (well, he’s a fan of her hotness, not her talent) so this was the third of these movies I’ve been dragged to. Turns out, this film was the best of the trilogy, which is saying basically nothing at all. Just like the first two, this is a lifeless, lazy excuse for a zombie flick in which we get kung fu fights against some of the worst excuses for zombies I’ve ever seen.
Here we’re at least treated to a new type of premise, as the survivors of the Zombie plague orchestrated by the Umbrella Corporation must travel in a Road Warrior style wasteland, and the film even starts out kind of promising, as Alice (Jovovich) gets captured by rednecks who throw her into a pit full of zombie dogs for sport. The sequence is mildly exciting, which is better than either of the first two films managed within their running times.
Then we’re introduced to a caravan of survivors traveling through the desert, on an exodus to try and find a place where the zombie plague can’t reach them. Here’s where the credibility of this film goes downhill for me. According to this film, apparently after the apocalypse comes, only really hot women will survive. Women like Ali Larter, Ashanti, and Spencer Locke make up the female cast of this picture, and there’s not a regular looking woman between them. How did this happen? Were these hotties more athletic than their more everyday counter parts? Is there some mutant super-model gene that turns these chicks into Zombie killing machines?
Not only that, but apparently in a world that doesn’t feature running water, these women still manage to somehow look fresh and clean. Ashanti actually looks as if she just got done with a photo shoot, put on some riot gear and walked onto the set of this film. Worse yet, nearly every close-up of Milla Jovovich is horribly distracting because her face was digitally airbrushed in almost every scene. I’m not even sure why this was done, and it’s not like she has an ugly face or something, and yet this film decided to make her look plastic. I know this is all nitpicking, but it’s the little things that make a film truly memorable, and when they’re not there you really notice them. Films like this with big budgets shouldn’t get out-classed by no budget zombie movies, and yet these films somehow keep getting made.
And really, all these flaws could have been forgiven if the storytelling in this movie was just worth a damn, but its not. For every fight scene, we get a scene where a character gets bitten, but then tries to hide it from the rest of the group. I mean, by this time, the plague has been enduring for five years, so these people know what’s going to happen to them. They know they’re going to turn and then kill their friends, and yet here this guy is, completely ignoring that he’s turning into a zombie until the last possible moment. Nothing is worse than a Horror movie that creates situations that count on its characters being completely stupid, and that’s what this film does. In fact, its all this film does.
Well, does it at least have cool action in it? Eh, not really. Remember all those cool images of Las Vegas as a wasteland from the trailer? The main characters of this movie don’t reach Las Vegas until an hour into the movie, and when they get there, they’re ambushed by a truckload of zombies placed by the Umbrella Corporation. Now while this sounds ok on paper, all the zombies have been captured and given jumpsuits and shaved heads, which made me wonder if these undead were put to sleep while henchmen from Umbrella dressed and shaved them. We’re talking about hundreds of zombies here too, so it would take some real men to get in there with flesh eaters just to get these guys all in uniform. I realize that this film is a video game adaptation, but that doesn’t mean that the villains in this have to be the ones from Bad Dudes.
On top of that, once again these survivors have apparently never seen a zombie movie, as every time a flesh eater gets shot in the chest I wanted to scream “Aim at the head!” Even Jovovich’s big moment where she gets to kung fu all the zombies with these two machetes comes off as sloppy and cheap, as the film makers have her slashing the throats of every zombie, which to my knowledge has never killed a zombie in a movie ever. How much more expensive would it have been to make these kills beheadings?
Again, this type of lackadaisical film making only serves to show almost utter contempt for the movie’s audience. It doesn’t matter what type of fetish-wear that Jovovich has on or how many slow motion fight scenes you have in your movie if every five minutes there’s something else that distracts you because it simply does not belong in the movie. How many times can we go back hoping the next one will be good when they never are?
It’s time for this series to finally die off; as these movies have been horrible abominations since the get go. Does anyone else remember when George Romero had signed on to direct the first movie and then left the project after differences with Sony, only to be followed on the project by Paul W.S. Anderson? That would be like Scorsese leaving Goodfellas and Warner Brothers signing Joel Schumacher to replace him. Only Anderson is worse, as at least Schumacher has Lost Boys under his belt.
Anderson, who wrote this film, has been the bane of this franchise since its very beginning. Never has such a lifeless film maker gotten so much work, mostly just by sticking to Video Game adaptations. It makes me wonder if studio executives even watch these movies before they sign him. Please, please, please Sony just let this be the end.
Well, this column ended up just being one long rant, but to be honest I haven’t really laid into a movie in a while and this one was fun to just tear apart. I promise that next week I’ll finally finish the rundown on my movie weekend and finally get to something else. Until next week folks, have a good one and don’t go see this movie.
Picture Credits: moviebox.se, impawards.com
