Overrated entertainer

The dazzling camerawork, with plenty of aerial shots, scarcely makes
up for the mediocre fare which Resident Evil: Afterlife (3D) offers

THAT Milla Jovovich is back should be music to the ears of sci-fi action-heavy horror movie fans and though Resident Evil: Afterlife (3D) is precisely old wine in new bottles, they will not mind it.

But what about others? They don’t just matter to director-scriptwriter Paul W.S. Anderson, who has employed the services of James Cameron and Vincent Pace’s Fusion Camera System that was so effective in Avatar. In Afterlife, too, the 3D effects are impressive with a couple of close calls but the absence of even a faint storyline makes most of this super technology come to naught.

That the ravishing heroine Milla Jovovich has married Anderson, the director, who is back on this film. The first three efforts were Resident Evil, Apocalypse and Extinction. But Alice (Jovovich) is looking none the worse for having lived on virus-infected zombies for eight years now and is looking for survivors of the T-virus outbreak in Extinction.

She makes an impressive entry in her battle against the ubiquitous Umbrella Corporation head (Albert Wesker) descending on a rope to decimate an army of dispensable minions. It is too violent to start with. In fact, the establishing shots are so full of violence (accompanied by blaring sound) that the very purpose of unfolding the story (ha! ha!) is well nigh defeated.

Towards the middle, one gets an inkling of the plot but it is too little too late. The film, of course, sticks to its grain of letting this one-woman army go on a rampage. One of them is Claire (Ali Larter), one of the survivors, who has lost her memory. There’s a dramatic plane landing on the top of a building with its nose off the edge.

Glen Mac Pearson’s camerawork is dazzling as he uses a good deal of aerial shots (a trend of the 1970s) but that scarcely makes up for the rest of the mediocre fare.

Milla Jovovich may be good looking but her acting skills are quite absent (or may be those shots are lost on the floor of the editing room) and Ali Lather is only a wee bit better. Wentworth Miller (as Claire’s brother) and Boris Kodge) are merely academic in this much-overrated entertainer. More sound than fury.

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