By now it was official and expected to get a new Resident Evil film sequel every 3 years, and in like clockwork in 2010 arrived Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth one, which also brought back to directing Paul W.S. Anderson, whom passed around the director duties after the first one, but was always writing the scripts, and as we will see, he would stick around for the rest of the film series as director & writer of his wife fanfic adventures in this Resident Evil canon.
And since we passed the third entry already, i guess they felt necessary to also go the 3D route, as the entire movie was shot this way, for obvious gimmicky (and lucrative) reasons, with the obvious parts meant for 3D as easy to notice in 2D as usual.
We immediatly continue from where Extinction left off, with multiple Alice clones attacking the Tokyo Umbrella hideout as promised, wielding kunai, double uzi, double katanas, and their psionic power, so yeah, Anderson it’s so obviosly and strongly back at the wheel, for better or worse, and it’s definitely not in the mood for hotdogging, so we jump straight into the bombastic action at the beginning, we’ll do the exposition and new and returning characters later.
So in a way we’re proper starting down the road of entertaining utter bullshit, going proper as its director ever wanted to, and the cowpie parade continues on, as Alice, now human (Wesker stole her T-Virus powers before they crashed into a mountain) tries to reach that rumored safe haven in Alaska, Arcadia, which they discussed about in the previous movie, only to find an amnesiac Claire Redfield and bring her along as she heads to Los Angeles, in search of other survivors that maybe can shed light on the situation, maybe even on Claire’s foggy memories…
Yep, we’re playing that hand AGAIN.
And we’re finally bringing Chris Redfield into the cast, played by Sergio Peris-Mencheta, and he looks ok, as is the choice of basing him more on his RE 1 design than the beefcakeroni he becomes in RE 5……. wait, nope, the character that looks and acts like RE 1 Chris Redfield IS NOT Chris Redfield, that would be, well, Chris Redfield, looking and being a wrongfully imprisoned soldier that wants out of prison, played by Wentworth Miller of Prison Break fame. That’s casting for you.
As i was saying, it’s kinda odd to have a normal-muscled Chris Redfield here, given how the movie otherwise pillages not only infected with Plagas-style mutated mouths, (now with inexplicable burrowing powers, because “mole zombies” were missing from the bingo card), the zombie dogs splitting themselves in half but also a mini-boss from that game, The Executioner (called “Axeman” here for some reason but still looking identical as his videogame counterpart).
Heck, they even steal a couple of plot points and twists from RE 5 (which was the most recent entry in the mainline series at the time), pretty odd since previous movies at best had just some of the RE series bestiary being unleashed when they needed to escalate things above just busting caps in humdrum basic zombo brains.
Speaking of of which, Wesker has been confusingly recast…. but honestly for the better, with Shawn Roberts (Land Of The Dead, Diary Of The Dead, 2006’s Skinwalkers, lots of Canadian tv shows) playing him instead of Jason O’ Mara, no offense but he looks and acts more the part (though O’ Mara didn’t have much to do in Extinction, to be completely honest, he literally just sat around), more like the sleak, stonefaced yet smug, serpentine character of Wesker.
The CG confusingly got a notch worse here, some fake ass explosions and flying planes sequences, but if you want some tacky, dumbass, shlocky actionxploitation cum horror garbagerie, if you want some trashy yet quite entertaining action-horror crapfest, Resident Evil Afterlife it’s there to delight with his notable amount of bullshit, lots of lifted enemies and plot points from RE 5, and bombastic action scenes with plenty of slow mo, cheap explosions, emphatic use of insert shots and obvious parts where you are supposed to whip out the 3D glasses to some some shit thrown at the screen.
It’s not good, it has no intention of trying anything more ambitious as the film that came before it, deary me, no, and it’s quite “the something” when the videogame you’re mining for plot points has better directed cinematic cutscenes than an actual movie meant for the theathers, the characters are cardboard as they come, acting is there (that much can be said), and some of the fight choreography and editing… leave something to be desired, to be quite generous.
And yet, it’s definitely the more entertaining one, again, if you watch these movies for some really dumbass fun, there’s plenty of stupid yet entertaining stuff to see, from an era when these movies were genuine in their shlockery, and didn’t feel the need to hide themselves behind some cynical and always transparent strata of cheap meta humour.
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