Resident Evil: NOT Better Safe Than Sound

I just know that when the unrated, uncut, uncensored, unbutchered, unsanitized version of Resident Evil comes out on DVD in a few months, it's gonna rock. I just know it! It's gonna have people being chopped in half, monsters being blown up real good, and plenty of T&A. The good things in life! Unfortunately, for now, gore fans and horror audiences must suffer through this safe, disappointing, and really badly edited version coming to theaters this Friday, March 15.

Resident Evil will probably never be a great film, regardless of what form it takes in the future. It's probably the first movie ever made by zombies, about zombies, for zombies. It's not so much a motion picture as it is a collection of moments. Gory moments. Horrific moments. Tense moments. Mostly dumb and disappointing moments.

But it does have its moments. Read on.

Directed by Paul Anderson, Resident Evil is based on the popular and graphically violent video game in which a semi-elite fighting force must infiltrate the Hive, an underground lab in which a botched experiment and an emotionless central computer have apparently conspired to turn the lab employees into zombies and some of their test animals into vicious, alien-like creatures. Milla Jovovich stars as Alice, a butt-kicking babe who goes through much of the film with no memory of who she really is thanks to some ill-timed nerve gas.

When we first see her, she is stammering through a cold, dark house wondering where the Hell she is. Then, a squad of commandos bursts through the living room windows and whisks her off to the Hive to shut down the main computer. If you are not familiar with the game, my guess is you are going to be almost completely lost during most of Resident Evil. The plot is set up so poorly that we almost don't know why these soldiers are taking along an amnesiac woman, another amnesiac man they find along the way, and a guy they suspect is a criminal who they handcuff immediately. They apparently know Alice, but she doesn't know them.

The central failure of Resident Evil is that it doesn't make us care for any of these people. There is not one personality in the group. They're not even personality types. You don't get the brave one, the scared one, the crazy one, or the dumb one. Instead, you get the black guy, the Latino chick, the Asian chick, and the non-descript white dudes. They all look damn good, but they all deliver their lines with the passion and feeling of a hostage in a ransom video. Michelle Rodriguez of The Fast and the Furious is perhaps the most recognizable of the doomed commandos (or whatever they are). But she is nothing more than a poor man's Jeanette Goldstein. Her big line? "When I get out of here, I think I'm gonna get laid."

Bill Shakespeare has nothing to worry about.

When will filmmakers realize that in order for their action or horror movies to be legitimately tense and to really work, we have to CARE about the characters?! We have to want them to survive. We have to hate the bad guys or the bad monsters or the bad machinery that is after them, because they're coming to kill our guys. I personally don't need much. Aliens pulled off this trick beautifully with a few colorful exchanges in the dining-hall scene and the strategy scene. The characters in Resident Evil all seem to be posing. They have two facial expressions: intense and sweaty intense. Not one of them cracks
a smile or a joke or has a real human moment. They have all the depth of a . . . well, a video-game character.

Now, don't me wrong. Video game characters are great. Most of the time, all they consist of is a big hand clasped around a big gun that you can fire all of the time. But the only person who actually has fun with a video game character is the person playing the game. If you are standing there over your buddy's shoulder ... yeah, you want him/her to do well. But a few minutes pass, and you're bored as Hell.

Here is where the bad editing comes into play. The guy who edited Resident Evil is Alexander Berner. Mr. Berner can you say, "My name is Alex, and I'm an alcoholic?" That is the only way I will excuse the shoddy structure of this film's action scenes. You were either drunk or rockin' the gonge, man, when you were there in the editing booth late at night. If you come clean now, man, I'll let you slide. There is STILL the DVD!

Resident Evil gives us about a half-dozen sequences that could have been really and truly awesome. Rodriguez has a great, rapid-fire rifle. The others are all packing heat, as well. And midway through, Jovovich discovers her inner Lara Croft and starts to chop-suey zombies and demon dogs with reckless abandon. But there are way too many cutaways, too many good showdowns that either end too soon or you just never reach a cool conclusion. In some scenes, a character is shooting and punching away at the walking dead. In the next, everything is quiet and he/she is safe and sound. In one moment, two characters are talking in front of a computer. In the next, they're all of a sudden running down a corridor towards a door that needs to be locked or else.

And I can't get over how many times the filmmakers cut away from what could have been a truly great, gore-ific moment. One character gets chopped in half by an errant elevator. We don't see it. Another character gets sliced into several dozen pieces by a motion-activated laser beam. We only see one chunk of him fall off (although we do get to see a pretty cool beheading just before that). At one point during last night's preview, I actually cried out: "I want the Bootleg version of this film RIGHT NOW!"

And nudity fans, you're also out of luck. Only a few fleeting glimpses of Jovovich naked. In too many scenes, director Anderson teases us, then fails to deliver thanks to a strategically placed towel, shower curtain, or other piece of fabric.

Hey, I'm just telling it like it is. Anyone interested in seeing Resident Evil wants gore and nudity. They're not paying for good, wholesome, moral entertainment. They don't want Gosford Park. They want Jurassic Park with zombies. They want those zombies getting their heads blown off. They want characters being impaled in creatively sadistic ways. At the very least, they want their B-movie actresses to "show some."

Resident Evil pulls too many punches. It also has no emotional payoff. I wouldn't put it in with the walking dead. How 'bout the walking dud?

Resident Evil is rated R for gore, violence, language, and partial nudity.