Resident Evil: Afterlife (DVD/Blu-Ray) -- Dir. Paul W.S. Anderson. Starring Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Wentworth Miller.
Milla Jovovich and friends kill zombie supervillains while striving to look as cool as possible.
I haven't kept up with the Resident Evil series of movies, so I guess I've missed some of the intricate twists that brought us here. Apparently Milla Jovovich now has superpowers and can clone herself. I suppose I can roll with that, but what I don't get is why even without her powers she can survive a plane crash into the side of a mountain. Or why the hordes of zombies dumb enough to run off the side of a building can also dig a secret tunnel through about a mile of rock and concrete to get into that same building. Or why, with only a few hundred humans left on Earth, the Umbrella Corporation is still interested in kidnapping them and running sinister experiments. Don't their employees have better things to do than keep showing up for work?
Video game movies are bad. This is a clear pattern. But the problem isn't that the movies are based on video games; it's that they're based on what directors and other members of the general public who have never actually played one imagine video games are like. This means a lot of invincible heroes carrying two submachine guns and a sword doing backflips then freezing in mid-air and kicking people across the room. That's Resident Evil: Afterlife, if you picture the entire thing in five straight minutes of slow-motion. It crosses the line beyond mere tastelessness into a realm of anti-taste that explodes upon contact with regular taste.
The Resident Evil game series is already pretty bottom-of-the-barrel in terms of writing and acting, but at least it's about fairly ordinary (if excessively muscled) people struggling to survive. I don't know how we got from there to here.
There were worse movies in 2010. Resident Evil: Afterlife is merely moronic, which is better than moronic and tedious. It's actually not bad when the characters aren't fighting... or moving. Or talking.
I guess some of the scenery is kind of nice.Rated R for tentacle faces.2 out of 5
The American (DVD/Blu-Ray). Dir. Anton Corbijn. Starring George Clooney, Violante Placido, Paolo Bonacelli.
George Clooney finds that even murdering women doesn't stop them from throwing themselves at him in this understated drama.
The American is almost absent a conventional plot. Clooney plays "Jack," an assassin left shaken by the ugly end to his last assignment - although he's not the type who would show it. At its surface, the film isn't much more than two hours of Jack wandering around an Italian town, eating at cafés, hanging out with a prostitute, and gradually constructing the weapon he's been tasked with delivering for his next job. There's a car chase or two, and more gunshots than dialogue, but this is far from an action movie.
Within the first five minutes, the film establishes Jack as an essentially despicable character, setting itself a challenging task: not to redeem him, exactly, but to round out our picture of him before the credits roll. Clooney is stonefaced and his character has little to say, but from his behavior we can see that he is profoundly lonely. Though Jack is fully to blame for any misfortune he encounters, he hints at a desire to change. His failures are real, not just a launching point for his next bout of Hollywood heroics.
Still, some pieces of the story don't feel like they quite fit. The friendship Jack strikes up with a local priest (Paolo Bonacelli) never finds a way to fully justify its place in the film. And the unlikely appearance of the main villain for a final showdown with Jack is a little too James Bond for a movie like this.
Its slow pace will make it dull for many, but The American is about the gradual culmination of many insignificant events. The powerful final scenes are a payoff that could only have been achieved with a slow boil.
Rated R for the longest sex scene ever (outside of certain genres).4.5 out of 5
