Resident Evil 2: The Apocalypse
I
didn’t really have strong feelings for the first Resident Evil picture
and so I never bothered to check out either of sequels. But some friends of mine told me the second
one was a highly entertaining craptasterpiece and
that this Jill Valentine chick in it has a nice rack. They were right on both counts.
This
instalment takes places in Toronto, which has been renamed Racoon City. I guess the Canadian government decided that
using a misspelling of the Native Indian name for the city was insulting to its
Inuit population and renamed the city after something that fucks around in
garbage. I’m guessing under this namechange regime, Montreal already got ‘New Maggotsville’.
Anyway, Toronto is having a pretty shitty day seeing as they are facing
a zombie/monster outbreak. Seeing as
they’re the one city in Canada that shits its pants and calls in the military
at the sight of 5 centimetres of snow, you can guess how poorly they handle this
catastrophe. The cops get their dream
situation handed to them in that they finally get to shoot oodles of unarmed
civilians, but when there’s no bribes the job kinda
loses its lustre.
We meet a new
hero, Jill Valentine, who wallpapers her home with newspaper clippings about
how she is a disgraced cop thrown off the force. They took her uniform and her badge, but I
guess they forgot to ask for her pistol.
Like most large-breasted women, she’s held accountable for her actions
about as much as a tornado is, so when she shows up at her former police
station and shoots a bunch of unarmed handcuffed prisoners, the guys on the
force all just shake their heads at her in mild annoyance like they just saw a
punk kid with too many piercings. Makes
you wonder what got her kicked off the force.
Jill shot all
these prisoners because she heard about the zombie outbreak on the radio. In the case of this movie she was right to
shoot the prisoners because they were infected with a zombie virus, but for all
she knew they were just people with bad complexions or people trying to dance
funny. I’m glad she wasn’t around back
when Orson Welles did his War of The Worlds broadcasts. Jill’s given some of the film’s worst lines
and her acting is clearly no match for it, although making her nipples a bit
harder might’ve helped that dialogue go down a bit smoother so I can’t let her
off the hook completely.
We meet several
more characters including two stereotypical black characters. One who says ‘muthafucka’
in every sentence and one who says ‘bullshit’ in every sentence, yet sadly they
never have a conversation together.
There’s also some Scott Adkins-lookin’
dude. But this is a ‘chicks rule boyz drool’ feature, so none of these male characters
matter.
The big evil
Umbrella Corporation quickly moves in to lock down the area, complete with
giant iron barriers that, of course, have their logo all over them. I guess nobody else wanted to pay for
advertising space on the inside of a city-sized tomb. When people try to escape the infected Racoon
City, guys atop the big iron barriers shoot them and tell them to retreat into
the infected city. I think we all know
that this isn’t typical corporate behaviour.
In real life they’d probably just offer people free iPods to subject
themselves to the zombie virus, and sadly, most people would probably see that
as a good deal.
So this is the
point where I call Paul W.S. Anderson’s screenwriting subtle in two different
ways. It’s probably the only time he’ll
get this type of compliment, so I hope he enjoys it. The top brass of this Umbrella Corporation
are all a bunch of blonde pasty-faced dudes with European accents, and their
logo is even a swastika with a few of the lines connected. Yet this movie is miles ahead of Ultraviolet
or any other sci-fi movies I’ve seen that have had clearly Nazi-inspired bad
guys. Making the bad guys a corporation
with a cutesy name and logo is at least a good stab at acknowledging who’s
trying to take over the world these days and how. I know mankind is pretty dumb, but there’s
some shit the human race doesn’t fall for twice, and electing guys who resemble
Hitler and the Nazis is one of them.
These days we’re slowly dominated through consumerism, so way to go for kinda realizing that, Paul W.S. Anderson.
Also, this
movie at least keeps you guessing as to what kind of movie it’s going to
be. I mean, it’s a sequel to a video
game movie, so we know it’s not going to be an original movie, but Anderson at
least keeps as guessing as to which formula he’s going to rip off. The way the previous Resident Evil
movie ended with Milla waking up alone in a seemingly
deserted and demolished city, we were led to expect a The Omega Man ripoff. But then Resident
Evil 2: The Apocalypse pulls a Bourne 3: The
Ultimatum and doubles back to show a bunch of new stuff leading up to that
end of the previous instalment. The
movie introduces all these characters who look pretty fucked. So then I was thinking it was a set up for a
Romero rip where a group of mismatched people all hole up in a makeshift
fortress, in this movie it was looking like it would be a church, and then
ultimately make one last stand against the zombies and make a break for
it.
But it seems
Anderson settled on making this an Escape From New
York riff, where some badass warrior that the system doesn’t give a shit
about is enlisted to rescue somebody valuable from a dangerous quarantined
area. And again,
surprisingly subtly. I didn’t
have any uncomfortable Doomsday flashbacks of some dude just showing me
his favourite movies. Resident Evil
2: The Apocalypse felt like its own piece of shit.
The rescue
target is the daughter of one of the Umbrella Corporation’s top
scientists. But it seems this scientist
guy doesn’t think very highly of his daughter because he sends her to dog
school, which is where she’s hiding during this whole zombie outbreak. Despite attending classes with Dobermans,
she’s very well spoken, although also very obedient. I thought Bob Hoskins was fucking cold for
raising Jet Li as a dog in Danny The Dog: Unleashed,
but to do that to your own daughter, fuck.
Anyway, like I
said about the first Resident Evil, it wasn’t good enough to be an
actual movie, but it also wasn’t stupid enough for me to laugh at. This time Anderson fully commits to making a
retarded movie and the result is fantastic.
It seems that when the Umbrella Corporation’s scientists aren’t raising
their daughters as dogs or unleashing zombie viruses, they also create giant
Frankenstein monsters for combat purposes.
What happened to the days when these multi-nationals would just splash
out their profits on private jets and whores?
Even though these monsters are enormous, have no noses or ears, and only
one eye, they are master assassins who can aim a machine gun, which they hold
like a briefcase, and hit with precision aim.
But it seems
these corporate guys have some sort of bet going on as to who’s the better asskicker, Milla or the
Frankenstein. So this evil executive guy
flies the scientist guy into the infected city, only to tell Milla how valuable the scientist is to their organization
and then shoot him in front of his daughter and somehow leverage this into
getting Milla to have a little
fisticuffs with the Frankenstein. This
slimy blonde European executive guy doesn’t even seem to mind the fact that the
whole city is scheduled for nuclear extermination in five minutes, he really
wants this show. Shit, you give a fucker
an MBA and a corner office and he thinks he’s
invincible.
Anyway, Milla obliges with the fistfighting
of the Cyclopes until we get an absolutely laugh out loud moment where looks
into the Frankenstein’s eye and somehow recognizes him as the mutant of a guy
who I guess was in the first movie, but I forget him. The exec guy actually commands her to “Finish
Him!” and you wonder if Anderson momentarily forgot which video game he was
adapting here. At this point it doesn’t
really matter, I was half-expecting the big atom bomb they were going to drop
to turn out to be a giant Pac Man that would devour the city.
Then we get a
whole bunch of confusing shit where it seems like Anderson doesn’t know what
kind of sequel he’ll make next, so he gives us every cliffhanger
possible to set up a story that could virtually go in any direction. You get some cloning, some faked deaths, some
traitoring, some guy who seemed to be expecting
something that should be a surprise, and some heroes riding off into a sunset
type shit. So I guess the only way to
find out if the crew journey to Hobotown and fight a
Donkey Kong is to see the next movie, which has been out for several years now.
If you liked this, here are some other recommended
writings:
Winner of the
lifetime disgrace award for Mila Jovovich.
Highlander 2:
Renegade Version
This one’s a doosey.
This film is a pleasant
magazine in the waiting room for Transporter
3.