This, the second movie adaptation of the Resident Evil video game franchise, was to be originally sub titled NEMESIS, which makes sense really when you consider the 3rd game in the series had the very same name. Yet for whatever reason the studio decided at the last minute to change the it, and so what we are left with is a movie called RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE that doesn't actually feature an apocalypse. After careful examination of the films excruciatingly painful dialogue, acting and action sequences I have now come to the conclusion that the reason the movie is called this is for one very simple reason….. While viewing it you will wish an actual apocalypse did occur in real life just to make the movie end….

While the original RESIDENT EVIL was something of a disappointment, it did at least deliver a hundred minutes of entertainment that was slickly put together by director Paul Anderson. It is true that Anderson cannot write a decent script (he wrote both movies) to save his life, yet his direction on the first was competent enough to just about make up for that fact, he knew when to build tension and when to let the action rip. Here director Alexander Witt shows no such restraint and it turns out that APOCALYPSE is pretty much one set piece after another that doesn't give the characters in the movie, or the viewer, a single moment to catch their breath. This wouldn't be an entirely bad thing if it wasn't for the fact that his direction is some of the worst you will ever see on screen. Besides constantly using some truly obscure slanted camera angles (possibly to show the "anarchy" surrounding people onscreen), Witt frames shots in a way that even when nothing is really happening you can't even decided which character is facing which direction. The whole film feels like it has been spliced together without any thought whatsoever and the end result is a very nauseating experience for the audience. The actual action sequences come off worse still, if you can believe that. There are some truly ludicrous set pieces that occur during APOCALYPSE's runtime, this is a movie where Jill can hit a zombie square in the head with a single bullet when she has her eyes closed and Alice can ride through a church window on a motorcycle, land in the isle, back flip off her bike, kick it into the air then as it collides with a Licker, fire a couple of shots into the gas tank and watch both the bike and the monster explode, before taking care of the rest of the nasty things in the room. Yet for all its extravagance the movie never feels as such, the numerous fight scenes are all pretty much framed from the shoulders up so even if the choreography is good you won't notice and the rest of the action, with the possible exception of Alice's first run-in with Nemesis, is again shot so badly you just don't know what the hell is going on, not to mention Witt seems to have tried to go for the record of how many cuts it is possible to fit into a single ninety minute movie, if you blink you'll have probably missed three shots.

As is the case with most blockbusters these days the special effects are all APOCALYPSE has left to pick up the pieces and try and string them together in some type of entertaining way. Unfortunately the film doesn't even have decent CGI going for it, the lickers look like they have been ripped straight out of a cut scene from Resident Evil 2 and stuck in the film, and the less said about the zombie dogs the better, although we can be thankful that no one does slow motion kung fu on them this time. As I've already mentioned Nemesis himself does have the one decent action sequence in the film where he squares off against Alice, throwing her all over the place, firing his nifty rocket launcher about and crashing through walls. This sequence almost invokes the same sense of urgent terror in the viewer as the encounters with him in the game brought to the player, or at least it would have if the "scary" rubber mask that the actor playing him wears didn't at one point almost fall off. In fact this pretty much sums up the entire film, be it through the directors failed attempt to make his film stylish, the hopelessly dull stereotypical characters he uses or just the plain and simple fact that this is an action horror movie that is neither exciting or frightening. RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE is nothing more than one big special effect gone wrong, avoid it like the T-Virus.