Alexander Witt lets the virus out of the laboratory and into Raccoon City, then shoots the city at night in the rain. Milla Jovovich is game, the church set piece is daft fun, and the rest is noise in the dark.
The first Resident Evil, in 2002, kept its zombies in a laboratory under the ground, and whatever else you thought of it the walls gave it a shape. Paul W. S. Anderson directed that one; here he writes and produces and hands the chair to Alexander Witt, directing a feature for the first time. The virus is out of the Hive and into Raccoon City above, which is the obvious sequel, and the obvious problem comes with it. A city is bigger than a corridor and needs more filling. Witt fills it with rain, gunfire and a great deal of darkness, and at 94 minutes the film still feels padded.
The set-up is sound. The Umbrella Corporation seals the bridges, leaves its own soldiers inside with the civilians, and we watch what comes out. Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) gets a good entrance, walking into a police station and shooting a man her colleagues are still trying to reason with. Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr) is the decent soldier whose employer has stopped answering the radio. Alice (Milla Jovovich) arrives late, wakes in a hospital, and plays the rest of the film as someone who has read the script and is waiting for everyone else to catch up. That is not a complaint. She is the only performer who seems to know what kind of film she is in.
The church is the reason to stay. Jill, Terri Morales (Sandrine Holt) and Sgt. Peyton Wells (Razaaq Adoti) take shelter among the pews and find that something faster than a zombie has got into the rafters first; then Alice comes through the stained glass on a motorbike. We laughed out loud, and then laughed again when Witt held the pause long enough to tell us he wanted us to. Jeff Danna’s score, guitars and drum machines, is right for once, the one stretch where the noise and the picture agree. Paul Denham Austerberry’s production design gives the police station, the graveyard and the school the exact look of the game with the detail turned up, and for ten minutes the film is the cheerful rubbish it wants to be.
Then the lights go down and stay down. Derek Rogers and Christian Sebaldt shoot nearly everything at night, in rain, with the lamps behind the actors, so the dead are silhouettes and the fights are flashes. Eddie Hamilton cuts those fights into pieces a second or two long. Put the two together and a woman fighting a monster becomes a sequence of sounds with the occasional face. There is a long fall down the side of a building that should be the best stunt in the film and is instead a dark shape passing dark windows. We were bored, and then we were cross about being bored, because the film keeps promising to show us something and then turning the lights down.
The people do not help. Thomas Kretschmann’s Major Cain says the word Umbrella as if it were a rank and is given nothing else. Jared Harris, as Dr. Ashford, a father in a wheelchair watching his daughter Angie (Sophie Vavasseur) on a bank of monitors, brings more worry to the part than Anderson wrote into it. Mike Epps’s L.J. gets a laugh about one time in three, which is a better rate than the dialogue manages elsewhere. Nobody here has a relationship with anybody. They meet, they shoot, they run to the next building.
As a zombie film it is not frightening once, which is a strange thing to say of a 15 certificate with this body count. The violence happens in the dark or just off the edge of the frame, and the infected are extras in grey paint who wait politely to be shot. George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, in 1978, used a shopping centre to say something about shoppers. Anderson’s Raccoon City is a map with levels on it, and the film moves through them in order. Mary E. McLeod’s costumes, the tactical black and the short blue skirt, are the game’s, and they are worn by people the film never asks us to mind about.
Most critics have been unkind and we are only a little kinder. If you liked the first film, this is the same meal with larger portions and the lights turned off. Watch it at home with the curtains drawn and the brightness up, which is the only way to see what the money went on.
