Resident Evil: Afterlife is mediocre. It’s surprisingly not as awful as some have been claiming, but it just lazily rolls along without excitement or an inch of originality. There’s no genuine fun to be had in Paul W.S. Anderson’s directorial return to the already forgettable series. Not to sound like an old hoagy, but Anderson truly has made a video game instead of an actual film.
Being without logic isn’t its biggest issue, it’s the fact that it’s so sloppily told and structured that it becomes far more annoying than it is entertaining. You constantly feel thrown into scenes without a smooth feel and transition. It’s choppy. Right after one sees characters in peril, they’re all the sudden okay in the following scene. Characters escape situations with vehicles that you have no idea where they came from; it’s as if they magically appear. The coincidences and conveniences moments earn chuckles, but it’s also a reminder of how lazy and half-baked the script is. Everything feels like a rush to get to the next big slow-motion battle, and that’s another reason why this is just video game storytelling put on the big screen.
There seems to be much more focus on the overuse of slow motion than the actual plot itself. The ninety minutes of plot could be described in a mere sentence: Alice is fighting against an Umbrella Corporation head goon, who’s played hilariously straight despite spewing out some truly clunky lines. There’s hardly anything here to sustain a running time of even thirty minutes, and yet it somehow manages to triple that. Everything that happens seems fairly inconsequently and doesn’t hold much heft.
Paul W.S. Anderson is someone whose name isn’t exactly respected in the film nerd world. Anderson isn’t a bad filmmaker, he’s just not a competent one. Anderson can make cheesy fun like his remake Death Race, but here he just can’t tell a story of the epic scope he seems to be going for. It feels small and limited due to the fact not all that much happens. And whenever something possibly substantial does happen, it’s explained in a clunky manner with narration or characters speaking out as if you can’t figure out what’s going on.
If anything good can be said about Resident Evil: Afterlife, it’s not entirely dull. There’s a few moments of fun unintentional laughter, a slick shot here and there, and there’s some nice work done with the production design. But it still remains an underwhelming and un-involving experience. It’s not bad enough to be funny and it’s not well done enough to be fun, it’s simply stuck in the middle of the road as a slightly tedious hour and a half.
There are very cinematic and wonderfully told stories in videogames, but this represents the straight run-and-shoot games void of attachment. And I’d gladly take one of those over this failed attempt at entertainment.