Wolff rating: NOT BAD
Plot summary: Brains....BRAAAAAAIINS! Oh, I mean, um, there is a leak at Umbrella Corporation's underground lab, and someone has to go in and deal with it.
Biased, pithy comments: When I first played ``Resident Evil 2'', I was surprised. I was surprised at how much I liked a game with such horrid controls and such obviously cheesy voice acting. I hadn't even seen a George Romero movie yet, so I didn't realize how much Shinji Mikami had borrowed to make the game's mood so creepy. This was a neat game, but I was entranced when I played the Dreamcast sequel ``Resident Evil, Code Veronica.'' Sure, I had a little trouble from time to time with the bosses, but the combination of amazing visuals, tight play, and truly creepy writing left me wanting more, more, more. Since then, I've dabbled in other survival horror games, and perhaps only Jaleco's underplayed hit ``Carrier'' was more scary (despite poor production values), and mostly because it shied away from the traditional zombies'n'friends bad guys. But I digress. With a lineage that goes from comic book to movie to Japanese video game back to movie again, one has to think most of the big beats in this sort of genre exercise have been hit before. The production designer and director Anderson have decided that the real world with zombies has been done, and instead set the movie almost entirely in shiny laboratories underground with lots of brushed steel doors that shut with electronic locks. This is probably a little fresher, but it doesn't give the audience much familiar to hang on to; this is a movie that will seem science-fiction-y rather than horror-y. The characters might as well have signs over their heads, ``Good guy,'' ``Suspicous guy,'' ``Soon-to-be-dead African-American commando squad leader'', and I realized at one point only Rodriguez had smiled in hours, and *she* spends large chunks of the movie coated in blood, both her own and others. Thus, a stony-faced straightforward movie that hits lots of wonderful notes from the game (about the time Rodriguez was fitting plugs together to power up the train, I knew I was seeing homage). People who haven't played the game won't see much but a bland action movie that doesn't make sense for about 20 minutes at the beginning, and then resolves in a weird setup-the-sequel way (but will be intimately familiar to their friends who are saying, ``Dude! That's so much like the third screen in RezEvil 2! Wow!''). It was hella better than I thought it was going to be, but it's hardly the movie that will finally legitimize video game-to-movie conversions.
How many times I have seen it: x1
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Mabius.
Directed by: Paul Anderson