Film Friday: Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

I enjoyed Resident Evil. It was unoriginal, but it was a competent mix of action and horror. Resident Evil: Apocalypse, not so much. Resident Evil: Extinction stank. Now we have Resident Evil: Afterplot. This turd is so bad I wasn’t even going to review it, except I feel I’m entitled to a little payback and I want to highlight what's wrong with modern Hollywood bad guys.

** spoiler alert **

Resident Evil: Afterplot was incompetently directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. Anderson is so bland and lifeless as a director that he makes Michael Bay look like Fellini by comparison. In fact, looking over his resume reveals a list of films I truly wanted to like but whose pointlessness and sheer direct-by-numbers blandness was so high I left cursing Anderson’s name: Mortal Combat, Death Race, Alien v. Predator, Pandorum. This guy could ruin a birthday cake. Retire Paul.

Resident Evil: Afterlife is no different. Everything about it is bad:

● There is no plot. The film is a series of fight scenes held together with travel montages between the fights.

● The fight scenes are shamelessly ripped off from The Matrix. And I don’t mean a piece here and there, I mean all of it. Even the costumes are stolen.

● The fight scenes are done in annoying slow motion to highlight how close the actors come to getting a CGI knife or CGI bullet in the face. It's CGI Paul! We're not stupid and we're not impressed.

● The wire fighting is beyond ridiculous. Apparently, if you clap your hands together like an idiot, these characters can fly like Tinkerbell. And they can survive a ten story fall by rolling onto a knee when they hit.

● The music is stolen from various metal bands.

● It’s a given that heroes and heroines will still look well-kempt in Hollywood land despite an apocalypse. But it’s never this glaring. Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter and Spencer Locke apparently found the only beauty salon to survive the apocalypse and spend most of their days there. Indeed, commercials for hair and makeup products don’t have models this highly made up and coiffed. This is beyond the point of just noticeable and reaches the level of distracting.

● The evil Hollywood producer character is such a tired and unrealistic stereotype he’s insulting, but not as insulting as the racist stereotype that is his gay Asian houseboy. I guess you can still hate Asians in Hollywood?

● Why fly over the ruined Hollywood sign? So the retarded audience will recognize the city? Keep clapping people, this plane needs more pixie dust to stay aloft!

● There are a million practical questions too, like where does Jovovich get the fuel for an around the world flight? Why are the oceans and trees back when the planet turned to dust in the last film? Where do they get all the ammo? They fire more bullets than the A-Team, yet never run out of bullets except when it’s time for a dramatic slow motion weapon change. They don’t even seem to be carrying extra ammo. Why are a million dead trying to get into the prison in which they are hiding, but once the gate is down only small groups actually enter? Is there a hidden turnstile? Do they need tickets? Why does the speed with which the dead move keep change depending on the needs of the scene? Why the hell is everybody whispering?

But what really kills me is the bad guy. In fact, he’s a classic example of everything that’s wrong with modern Hollywood villains.

For starters, his motivation makes no sense. Corporations seek profits. There is no profit in making the world end. There just isn’t. And at one point, we’re told the bad guys are continuing research into the T-virus to make it more effective. Why? What purpose could that serve? Who do they think is going to buy this new weapon?

Eventually, the main bad guy does get a motivation that makes sense. He becomes infected, so he wants to capture humans to drink their DNA. BUT why would the corporation support him in that? He’s got teams of security personnel running around kidnapping and killing the humans that are left, but what security guy in his right mind would follow these orders? “Gee, the boss says to kill everyone, I guess I should do that?” This is ridiculous.

What’s more, during the opening in Japan, he does the clichiést of clichéy things and shoots his second in command when the man warns that blowing up the base will kill the loyal troops still defending the base. And nobody blinks. Give me a break. Even cultists aren’t going to follow this reckless, bloodthirsty monster -- and these guys aren’t cultists, they’re just corporate employees. "Well, I don't like his shoot the employees policy, but he did promise that 5% raise?!"

Further, this guy is all kinds of lame masquerading as cool. He whispers everything and spends his days sitting in a chair in a white room with nothing to do. . . live the high life! His dialog is pointless, bizarre and substance free. He says things like “you’ve become a real inconvenience to me” which makes no sense except that it sounds like something a bad guy might say. He has super powers but doesn’t use them to kill his enemies -- only to play with them and act smug. Indeed, he's ultra-smug, just so the audience hates him. But his smugness makes no sense. He's not smug about winning his fights, indeed, he loses all his fights, usually gets killed and always ends up having his base blown up. Yet, he acts all smug as we see him escape. Why would that make him act smug? “Ha ha! I showed you. . . I’m not-permanently-vincible!” Good grief.

This guy is the model for what is wrong with modern Hollywood villains: all style, zero substance. His motivations make no sense. His mental problems would make it impossible for him to ever rise to control a corporate empire. No henchmen would follow him. To the contrary, they'd shoot him long before things got out of hand. He spews clichéd nonsense just because it sounds hip. He dresses like a gay rock star. And he's comically unlikeable. Compared to him, cartoon villains like Snidely Whiplash and Wylie E. Coyote are paragons of depth, sanity and wisdom.

You have to be an idiot to accept villains like this guy as being even the slightest bit real. And I don’t like being treated like an idiot. That's why I don’t like this film and why I'm really at the end of my rope with Hollywood's lifeless villains. Ug.

So who's your favorite villain of the past? And where are you getting your hair done after the apocalypse?