Directed by Alexander Witt, 2004

I didn’t want to watch Resident Evil: Apocalypse.  I really didn’t.  But I needed something to review, was too lazy to get out of my bed, and it was the only ‘horror’ movie on HBO On-Demand.  So the remote won and my soul lost.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse is one of the stupidest movies I’ve ever seen.  It is worthless on a level most horrible movies will never even see.  I understand why this movie exists, money needs to be made and a sequel was an easy bet, but there is no reason why it needed to be this shitty. 

I write.  I realize it’s not easy to write a truly amazing screenplay, especially if you have producers breathing down your neck giving you notes all the time, but what the fuck is wrong with you, Paul W. S. Anderson?  You were a producer and the only screen writer!  Alexander Witt may get a lot of jobs as a second unit director, and he may be capable with the small stuff, but even his horrible direction here isn’t to blame for how pathetic this movie is.  As far as I’m concerned, the burden is entirely on Anderson’s shoulders.  I wish the world were full of wizards and witches, that way a curse could be cast on Paul W. S. Anderson, causing him to burst into flames any time he thought about making a movie again.

Logic is dead.  Common sense is dead.  Motivation is dead.  Characters are dead.  Story is dead.  Acting is dead.  Direction is dead.  Happiness is dead.  Originality is dead.  94 minutes of my life are dead.  Everything about this movie is lifeless.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse is so bad it actually made me feel bad for the actors.  I’ve dealt with actors and acting.  I understand when they have questions and reservations about roles etc, and I understand the pressure they feel when asked to do something out of character or just plain moronic, but they’ve taken the job, so they’ll swallow their pride and act like an idiot if they have to.  God bless ‘em for that, especially the cast of this offensive excuse for a horror/action/sci-fi/popcorn flick:

"You want me to do my best Western European accent for no reason, even though I’m really, really bad at it and we all know it?"

"You want me to fly through a stained glass window on a motorcycle while shooting guns?"

"You want me to wear headphones and listen to bad, already dated light "metal" music while I’m surrounded by a city of zombies?"

"You want me to wear a miniskirt the entire time and act like the most badass, heartless woman on earth, but then completely lose it when a casual friend of mine dies and I knew he was going to die the entire time?"

"You want me to wear the bulkiest, goofiest looking monster suit ever invented and try to do kung fu in it?"

"You want me to run down the side of a building for no reason, even though the stunt work looks really lame, just to kick someone in the face, when I’m carrying guns the entire movie and just could have shot them?"

And the list of moronic things these actors had to pull off goes on and on.  The scene where Jill walks into the precinct is actually more absurd than the intentionally absurd precinct scenes in Last Action Hero.  The subtitles which appear throughout the movie are cheesier than the cues in a VH1 Pop-Up video.  And the big baddie in the movie, the Nemesis, is about as scary as Bane from Batman and Robin:

Combine the vastly uninteresting plot with piss poor direction and even worse editing and the end result is barely endurable to the eyes and painful to the ears (at least Resident Evil had some half-decent sound tracks).

Why was I too lazy to get out of my bed when I woke up this morning?

Oh, and since when can you kill a zombie by breaking its neck?  The math of a zombie death is as remedial as you can get.  Brain + Object = Death.  That’s all you need to know.  You’re an idiot, Paul W. S. Anderson.