With their dramatic camera angles, understated music and authentic scares, the Resident Evil video games have always felt more like films. The actual movies, however, with their cheesy dialogue and ridiculous action sequences, feel more like video games, and bad video games at that.
Aside from being an awful, convoluted action flick in its own right, the first Resident Evil was guilty of abandoning the moody essence of the games in favor of slo-mo, midair, roundhouse kicks to the decaying snouts of zombie dogs. Apocalypse at least makes an effort to be more faithful to its source material.
Owing much of its inspiration to the game Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Apocalypse picks up where the last film left off. The evil, faceless Umbrella Corp., which specializes in cosmetics and ugly, undead bio-weapons (yes, you read that right), reopens the subterranean lab where zombies ran amok last time and lets the pesky T-virus infect the population of Raccoon City. Like Microsoft, Starbucks, and most mega-corporations, Umbrella keeps a giant mechanical wall around the city to uphold quarantine through martial law in case something like this happens.
Where the original retained none of the game's characters and few of the situations, Apocalypse gives us many. So many, in fact, that the story has a hard time naturally navigating from one game reference to the next. At times, we follow renegade cop and fan favorite Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) as she tries to lead a few surviving zombie hors d'ouvres out of the city before it's nuked. At other times, we follow Alice (Milla Jovovich), the sole survivor of the first film, as she delivers more slo-mo kicks to decaying faces. And finally, we have the monstrous Nemesis who, when not the receiver of Alice's slo-mo kicks, always looks on the verge of saying, "I can't move in this damn rubber suit!"
Game fans may be deceived into liking a great deal of Apocalypse. It's hard not to smile when the Nemesis finally growls, "Staaaars," and there's a giddy pleasure that comes with seeing Jill creep around in her blue tube-top, especially when she enters a room with a typewriter on the counter. But anyone who doesn't know why the typewriter reference is so clever will probably see this movie for exactly what it is: an action film so stupid, it's scary—not scary in the way that makes you jump; scary in the way that makes you stand up and leave.