Resident Evil: Apocalypse arrived in 2004 as the second film in a series loosely based on the video games of the same name. Alexander Witt directed. Paul W. S. Anderson wrote it. Milla Jovovich came back as Alice, the only actor to reprise a role from the first film. The sequel picks up directly after the events of Resident Evil (2002), with Alice out of the underground facility and Raccoon City in freefall.
It runs 94 minutes. It carries a tagline: “The evil continues…” The published critical score is 1.8 out of 10. That number is not a misprint. It holds up on a rewatch.
Trailer, via HD Retro Trailers.
Raccoon City Locks Its Only Bridge
The plot is a straight line. The zombie outbreak from the Hive spreads to Raccoon City. Umbrella quarantines the city and evacuates its important people. Alice wakes in a deserted hospital and wanders for supplies. She joins survivors trying to get out before Umbrella erases the whole experiment.
That is the engine. It never gets more complicated than that, and it never gets more interesting either.
Witt makes his feature directorial debut here. Anderson, who directed the first film, turned the job down because of other commitments but stayed on as a producer. You can feel that arrangement in the finished product. The film has the shape of the first one without the discipline. It borrows characters from the games, including Jill Valentine, Carlos Olivera and the villain Nemesis, and drops them into a plot that mostly runs in place.
Filming took place in Toronto. Locations included Toronto City Hall and the Prince Edward Viaduct. On screen, those places read as generic. The city is under quarantine, but it never feels like a city. It feels like a set.
Sienna Guillory Studies the Games
Sienna Guillory plays Jill Valentine, a disgraced S.T.A.R.S operative who returns to her precinct to push her fellow officers to evacuate. Guillory prepared by studying Valentine’s movements and posture in the games. That work shows in the physicality. It does not show in the writing, because the writing gives her almost nothing to do but move from one overrun position to the next.
At the only bridge out, Jill runs into her former partner, Sgt. Payton Wells, played by Razaaq Adoti. A civilian turns into a zombie and bites Wells. Major Timothy Cain, played by Thomas Kretschmann, seals the exit and forces residents back into the city. That decision is the closest the film comes to a real idea: the corporation locks the door on its own people to protect the experiment. The film states it and then moves on.
Oded Fehr plays Carlos Olivera, an Umbrella soldier abandoned by his employer. He and Nicholai Ginovaef, played by Zack Ward, team up with surviving police units to repel zombie attacks. Their position gets overrun. Carlos is bitten and infected. The film treats this as a problem to solve rather than a countdown to care about.
Jared Harris Hacks the Cameras
Jared Harris plays Dr. Charles Ashford. His daughter, Angela Ashford, goes missing after her security car is involved in a collision during the evacuation. Sophie Vavasseur plays Angela. Dr. Ashford breaks into the closed-circuit television system to contact Alice and the survivors. He offers to arrange their evacuation if they rescue his daughter. He makes the same offer to Carlos.
This is the plot’s one genuine bargain, and it should be the spine of the movie. A father trades escape for his child. Instead, the film treats the offer as a fetch quest. Go here. Fight that. Come back. The emotional stakes are named and then abandoned.
Meanwhile, Umbrella deploys Nemesis, the mutated supersoldier played by Matthew G. Taylor. Nemesis kills the remaining S.T.A.R.S. before searching for Alice. That is the character’s whole function. He is a large obstacle, and the film does not know what to do with him beyond staging another fight.
Mike Epps Gets the Only Live Lines
Mike Epps plays L.J., and his presence is the one thing in the film that feels alive. The role was written specifically for Snoop Dogg, who dropped out of production. Epps replaced him, and the character was rewritten to suit Epps’s personality. You can tell. He gets the only lines that land, because he is the only performer being allowed to behave like a person instead of a target.
Sandrine Holt plays reporter Terri Morales. Jill, Wells, and Morales get saved by Alice just before being overrun. That rescue is staged with some energy. It is also the last time the film generates any.
Iain Glen plays Dr. Isaacs. Matthew G. Taylor plays Nemesis. The cast is deep and largely wasted. Jovovich is the anchor, and she is game, but Alice has been stripped of the amnesia and the mystery that made her interesting in the first film. Here she is a competent woman in a corridor. That is not a character. It is a position.
A Casting Rumor Anderson Dismissed
One odd footnote from the production. Reports circulated before filming about actresses approached for the roles of Valentine and Claire Redfield, the latter of whom did not end up featuring in the film. Anderson later dispelled these as baseless rumours. The original film featured no characters from the games at all. The intention to add several was always there for Apocalypse.
The role of Valentine went to Guillory. The role of L.J. went to Epps after Snoop Dogg dropped out. Evanescence guitarist Ben Moody was given a cameo as a zombie Ginovaef kills. That is the level of texture the film offers off screen. On screen, it offers less.
Nemesis Has No Interior
Nemesis is the film’s biggest swing and its clearest miss. He is a mutated supersoldier, he kills the remaining S.T.A.R.S., and then he hunts Alice. That is a monster with no interior. The games gave the character a tragic weight. The film gives him a heavy coat and a rocket launcher.
The action is cut to pieces. Fights start, escalate, and end without geography. You rarely know where anyone is standing relative to anyone else. The zombies are numerous and interchangeable. The tension is supposed to come from the quarantine closing in, but the film keeps cutting away to another room, another hallway, another squad getting wiped out.
The runtime is 94 minutes. It feels longer. That is the real review.
$129.3 Million Does Not Rescue It
Here is the strange part. Resident Evil: Apocalypse earned $129.3 million worldwide on a $45 million budget. That surpassed the box office gross of the original film. Audiences showed up. The series continued. It was followed by Resident Evil: Extinction in 2007.
So the film worked as a business. It did not work as a movie. Those two facts can sit next to each other, and this is the one that matters: a franchise can be commercially healthy and creatively bankrupt at the same time, and Apocalypse is the proof.
On Metacritic, the film received “generally unfavorable reviews.” On Rotten Tomatoes, it became the lowest-rated entry in the Resident Evil series, with a rating of 18%. The published critical score is 1.8 out of 10. That is not a rounding error or a pile-on. It is an accurate reading of a film that has no idea what it is about.
What the Borrowed Characters Cannot Fix
The first Resident Evil was a contained thriller. A facility, a team, a countdown. Apocalypse opens the world up and loses the pressure. Quarantine should be a cage. Instead it is a backdrop. The city is locked down, but the film never makes you feel the walls.
The borrowings from the games are cosmetic. Valentine and Olivera and Nemesis are names and costumes. They are not characters with wants that drive scenes. Anderson’s script moves them like pieces. Witt shoots them like pieces. Nobody in the film seems to want anything except to get to the next location.
The one thread that could have carried the whole thing is Dr. Ashford and Angela. A father who built the virus that destroyed the city, bargaining with survivors to save his daughter. That is a story. The film uses it as a reason to send Alice to a building.
Resident Evil: Apocalypse is a 94-minute sequel that mistakes movement for momentum. It has the cast, the budget, and the source material to be something. It has a director making his feature debut and a writer-producer who had already done this once and better. It has Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Oded Fehr, Jared Harris, and Mike Epps. It does almost nothing with any of them.
The box office says $129.3 million. The reviews say otherwise. The score is 1.8 out of 10.
KEY FACTS BOX
– Title: Resident Evil: Apocalypse
– Year: 2004
– Director: Alexander Witt
– Writer: Paul W. S. Anderson
– Runtime: 94 minutes
– Genres: Horror, Action, Science Fiction
– Tagline: “The evil continues…”
– Budget: $45 million
– Worldwide gross: $129.3 million
– Rotten Tomatoes rating: 18% (lowest in the series)
– Published critical score: 1.8/10
– Followed by: Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
