Wednesday 27 April 2011

Movie Review: Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)


The 18th James Bond movie adventure maintains the momentum regained by the series re-boot that GoldenEye provided. The action is sustained, the characters dynamic, the humour appropriately dry, and the set-pieces deliver. The package may be familiar, but Tomorrow Never Dies nevertheless provides shiny entertainment with creative touches.

Megalomaniac media tycoon Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce) has a simple plan for world domination: create the news and be the first to report on it. He deploys his resources to build a combat stealth warship, and he hires master criminals Henry Gupta (Ricky Jay) and Stamper (Gotz Otto) to do his dirty work. Gupta has in his illegal possession a highly coveted piece of American military hardware that allows him to manipulate satellite signals, and Carver uses this gizmo to trick a British warship into straying into Chinese territorial waters, sparking a bloody international incident that threatens to erupt into World War Three. A side-benefit to Carver's war plan is the decapitation of the Chinese leadership, the installation of a Carver-picked new leader, and securing exclusive Chinese broadcast rights for his media empire.

Both the British and the Chinese intelligence services send in their agents in the form of James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) and Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh) to foil the plan. Bond is re-acquainted with an old flame called Paris (Teri Hatcher), who is now Mrs. Carver. After Paris pays the ultimate price for betraying her husband, Bond and Lin start to work together to bring down Carver's empire and to fight off the countless goons on Carver's payroll, including the sadistic Stamper. They also need to stop Carver from launching a massive killer missile that the Chinese will blame on the British.

Tomorrow Never Dies does suffer from an overtly cartoonish villain. Jonathan Pryce as Elliot Carver quickly steps into over-the-top histrionic territory, and makes no attempt at cultivating quiet nuance or controlled menace as the evil mastermind. Carver is outright nuts, and he is totally nuts from his first scene. Also blatant is the BMW-obsessed product placement, with the Munich firm supplying both Bond's four-wheel and two-wheel rides.

But the weaknesses are easily outweighed by the strengths of the movie, and Tomorrow Never Dies enjoys some terrific highlights. The pre-credit sequence with Bond spying on a terrorist arms bazaar is gritty and explosive. Bond navigating his BMW by remote control in a multi-level parkade while being chased by bad guys armed with machine-guns and rocket-propelled grenades is ridiculously fun. And the best sequence features Bond and Lin handcuffed together in Vietnam, having to escape by motorcycle from Carver's henchmen and a killer helicopter.

Roger Spottiswoode directs with a light touch, complemented by brisk but seamless editing work and excellent use of the Bond theme music. Two years after his Bond debut in GoldenEye, Brosnan is fully into his stride as the smooth agent, effortlessly dispatching enemies and seducing ladies. Michelle Yeoh holds her own opposite Brosnan's Bond, matching him in innovative combat and steely-eyed determination.

Tomorrow Never Dies does not stress the intellect, but it does celebrate Bond at his action-packed best in the spy series that never ends.






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Monday 25 April 2011

Movie Review: The Tailor Of Panama (2001)


A disappointing spy film adaptation of a John Le Carre novel, The Tailor Of Panama tries hard to create a steamy stranger in a strange land vibe, but it is undermined by a hollow centre and a premise that is close to ridiculous.

British intelligence agent Andy Osnard (Pierce Brosnan) operates under diplomatic cover, and after flubbing an assignment is reassigned to Panama. Upon arrival he makes contact with Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), a tailor peddling high quality suits to the ruling class. Pendel has a shady past and money problems but terrific contacts with both the powerful elite of Panama and the shady opposition. Osnard presses him into service to obtain and reveal sensitive information about future plans for the Panama Canal and an emerging underground revolutionary movement.

But Osnard is playing a dangerous game way beyond the normal confines of diplomatic intelligence gathering. He attempts to charm Pendel's wife Louisa (Jamie Lee Curtis) into revealing information that she has access to from her work for the Canal authority, and he keeps the British Embassy staff at bay by seducing Francesca Dean (Catherine McCormack), one of the Ambassador's key assistants. Osnard finally pressures Pendel into revealing plans for upcoming upheaval in the country, setting in motion an international chess game from which only one person will benefit.

Not many characters are likable in The Tailor of Panama, least of all Andy Osnard. Brosnan attempts to bring his ice cool Bond persona into Panama, but in the absence of a suitable villain or a nefarious plot as a counterweight, it's not a fair fight. Taking advantage of less sophisticated locals and run-of-the-mill diplomats may satisfy Osnard's ego, but contributes nothing to an engaging narrative. Rush is more absorbing as the tailor Pendel, but his eagerness to please and the ease with which he is manipulated is unconvincing.

The highly dubious plot developments do not help. Large amounts of international money and military hardware are set in motion based on flimsy and uncorroborated intelligence, and as we now know, only neo-conservatives in the White House with dreams of eternally controlling global oil supplies and avenging assassination plots targeting their daddies can pull that off.

The Tailor Of Panama only has it's setting to fall back on, and director John Boorman tries hard to evoke a seedy Casablanca style mood of foreign intrigue, with Casablanca even being mentioned in one exchange of dialogue. But this is not the 1940's, World War Two isn't raging, Pierce Brosnan is not Humphrey Bogart, and the future of the free world is not at stake. The Tailor Of Panama attempts to put on a power suit, but there is no hiding the intellectual vacuum between its ears.






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Sunday 24 April 2011

Movie Review: Fargo (1996)


A blood-soaked black comedy, Fargo is a captivating classic. Joel and Ethan Coen conjure up a mood of dark doom set against a bleak snow-covered landscape, enlivened by unforgettable personalities and rampant "Minnesota nice" behaviour.

In Minneapolis, car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) is buried under a mountain of debt and has no apparent legal solutions to dig himself out. In desperation, Jerry meets career criminals Carl (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear (Peter Stormare) in Fargo, North Dakota, supplies them with a car, and hires them to stage the kidnapping of his wife Jean. Jerry intends to get the ransom money from Wade, his rich father-in-law, and then split it with the kidnappers.

While Carl is thoughtful and just wants to get the job done, Gaear is silent and prone to extreme violence. After a clumsy break-in Carl and Gaear do succeed in kidnapping Jean, but on the highway near the town of Brainerd they are stopped by a highway patrol officer. Gaear brutally kills the patrolman and, for good measure, two witnesses who happen to be driving by. A staged hostage-taking is transformed to a triple murder investigation.

Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) is the Brainerd chief of police, and seven months pregnant. Her investigations of the highway murders lead her to Jerry's car dealership, and his shifty behaviour doesn't help his cause. With the noose tightening around him, Jerry is desperate to close the ransom deal, but Wade insists on delivering the money, resulting in many more dead bodies. Marge has to quickly follow the trail of violence to put an end to the bloody carnage.

Fargo is a brilliant crime film, one of the finest achievements of the 1990s, and the jewel in the Coen brothers' crown. Working from their own script, the Coens find the dark soul of evil against the chilly white fields of snow, and juxtapose dry humour with unspeakable violence. In the most staid and seemingly content of mid-America environments, the story throws up a desperate husband, a botched hostage taking and heartless killers prone to extreme violence. All that stands between evil running amok and the restoration of some semblance of sanity is a pregnant small town cop.

Although the film opens with the claim that the events portrayed are factual, this is part of the Coens' humour. In fact, the movie is only loosely inspired by a vaguely similar incident that occurred in Connecticut. Equally unhinging is the name Fargo: one scene is set in that city, and the rest of the story takes place across the border in Minnesota.

Fargo draws its radiance from four unforgettable characters. Macy successfully portrays Lundegaard as a man so in over his head that he is uncomfortable in own skin, just one step ahead of total despair. Buscemi creates an almost sympathetic character in Carl, a criminal who can only be described by all who meet him as "kinda funny looking". Violent only when driven over the edge by the apparent ineptitude of others, Carl is dangerously funny and always foul-mouthed.

Stormare's Gaear is nothing but silence, incessant smoking, and brutality. This is a criminal who does not hesitate to kill quickly and at close range, and he does not really care who knows it. It is Gaear who derails Jerry's plan and sets off the avalanche of killings, and none of it seems to bother him. And finally McDormand's Marge slowly takes over as the heart of the film, almost cheerfully overcoming the challenges of her pregnancy to doggedly untangle the web of murders and bring the case to a close, while looking after her marriage and fending off a semi-psychotic suitor.

The Coens direct with elegant understatement, allowing the scenery, the strength of the story, the exceptional characters and Carter Burwell's evocative soundtrack to breathe deep and confidently carry the film forward. Fargo's combination of character-driven comedy and cruelty is movie-making at its best.






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Movie Review: Back To The Future (1985)


A bright, cheerful and fast-paced comedy, Back To The Future elevated Michael J. Fox into movie stardom, established Robert Zemeckis as an A-List director of thoughtful comedies, and spawned two sequels. The DeLorean time-travelling car, the Flux Capacitor, and the Doc Brown character have had a long-lasting and fondly-remembered impact on popular culture.

Marty McFly (Fox) is a teenager in the small town of Hill Valley, California, struggling to fit in and embarrassed by his parents. Marty's Dad George (Crispin Glover) is a meek nerd, easily pushed around and insulted by his boss Biff (Thomas Wilson). Marty's Mom Lorraine (Lea Thompson) is conservative and a nag.

Marty's best friend is the local eccentric inventor Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd). Brown has invented something called the Flux Capacitor, and used it to convert a DeLorean car into a time travel machine. Brown seeks Marty's help to record the maiden journey of the DeLorean, but angry Libyan terrorists show up at the wrong time and force Marty to take refuge in the car and zip back in time to 1955.

It's the year that George and Lorraine met and fell in love. Marty's sudden appearance in Hill Valley of 1955 immediately causes a stir, and he disrupts the events that ignite George and Lorraine's high school romance. In fact, the young Lorraine immediately develops a crush on the cool Marty, ignoring the doofus George, who is already being continuously harassed by the bully Biff. Unless Marty can get his parents to fall in love, his existence will be erased.

Marty also has to seek the help of a young Dr. Brown (although he looks pretty much the same in 1955 and 1985) to travel back to the future, taking advantage of an impeding lighting storm. Marty has a week to frantically find a way to make sure that his parents do indeed fall in love, and in the meantime he takes every opportunity to improve their personalities along the way.

With Steven Spielberg as one of the Executive Producers, Back To The Future strikes the perfect balance between superior quality and self-depreciation. Director Robert Zemeckis directs with brisk pacing, making every scene count and sharply defining the key characters. While the film never aims for more than two dimensions, Fox ensures that Marty is eminently likable, and Lloyd makes Doc Brown, with his wild white hair and perpetually wide eyes, one of the more memorable mad scientists in movie history.

Lea Thompson gets the least showy but most delicate role. The film handles the potentially precarious covetous relationship between the young Lorraine and her teen-aged son with a playfully steady hand, and steers it to an unexpected but in retrospect obvious resolution.

The highlights are many, and include the DeLorean leaving flaming tire marks as it launches into time travel, Marty's skateboard antics, and his over-enthusiastic electric guitar shredding at the high school dance. Back To The Future's formula for success involves poking fun mostly at itself, and the film creates a rich environment with plenty of targets, and hits them all square on the funny bone.






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Saturday 23 April 2011

Movie Review: 48 Hrs (1982)


One of Eddie Murphy's earliest hits and one of the original buddy movies, 48 Hrs. provides some edgy entertainment but has a reputation that has perhaps surpassed the actual strengths of the material.

While on highway chain gang duty, convict Albert Ganz (James Remar, most famous for his role as Ajax in The Warriors) shoots two guards and escapes to freedom with the help of an accomplice. Arriving in San Francisco to seek the hidden money from the robbery that landed in him in jail, Ganz is soon cornered by the police in a seedy motel but shoots his way out after disarming burly police officer Jack Cates (Nick Nolte).

With two police officers now dead in addition to the prison guards, Ganz is a most wanted man, and Cates secures the release of Reggie Hammond (Eddie Murphy), one of Ganz's old accomplices, from jail for 48 hours to help end the killing spree. Jack and Reggie are like oil and water, and while Jack is desperate to catch up with Ganz, Reggie is desperate to get laid during his brief taste of freedom. Eventually the two men earn some mutual respect and close in on Ganz as he closes in on the money.

48 Hrs. has not aged terribly well. The plot was never the point, and it does not get better with time: that the only way to find a vicious and trigger-happy maniac tearing through the city and killing multiple police officers is to seek the help of a criminal who has been languishing in jail for two years defies all logic and the reasonable abilities and motivations of most police forces.

Which leaves us with the buddy dynamics between Nolte's police officer Jack, and Murphy's convict Reggie. It is a foul-mouthed, violence-prone relationship that is surprisingly lacking in wit or sharp laughs. As one of the original buddy movies 48 Hrs. was establishing the template rather than improving upon it, but the lack of ideas in the script is a bit painful, as is the over-dependence on Murphy's antics. Five different writers had a hand in the screenplay, including director Walter Hill, and the lack of a confident, purposeful tone is obvious. 

The scenes that work best allow Murphy to take centre stage, as in the red-neck bar with Reggie pretending to be a cop, but even then, the comedy is contrived, with the support actors waiting on cue to bend over and be the punch line of Murphy's cool jokes.

Nolte brings little that is new to the role of the lone cop doing things his way, with everything from his sour demeanour to his strained relationship with his girlfriend (an under-used Annette O'Toole) to his beat-up car borrowed from countless other movie and television cops.

48 Hrs. makes good use of the San Francisco locations, and the Murphy persona benefits from the freshness of talent being discovered rather than over-exposed. But while it's a movie that remains engaging, with the passage of time 48 Hrs. is looking quite ragged around the edges.


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Movie Review: The China Syndrome (1979)


Released 12 days before the nuclear power reactor incident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, The China Syndrome is fiction anticipating fact with chilling accuracy. It is also a well-made and thoughtful thriller, with tight pacing and excellent performances.

Reporter Kimberly Wells (Jane Fonda) and cameraman Richard Adams (Michael Douglas) are part of a local Los Angeles television crew compiling a documentary series on energy sources. While filming an informational segment at the Ventana Nuclear Power Plant, they inadvertently witness what looks like a serious incident: after an unexplained shudder, the control room staff, including shift supervisor Jack Godell (Jack Lemmon) and co-worker Ted Spindler (Wilford Brimley) are thrown into no small amount of panic as they deal with faulty valves and stuck gauges, narrowly averting a meltdown.

With another proposed nuclear power plant undergoing high-profile approval hearings, there is a rush to whitewash the incident and bring Ventana back on line. However, Godell is concerned enough to delve into the Ventana safety management procedures and uncovers falsified record keeping. Convinced that the plant will be unsafe if it is restarted, he agrees to share his findings with Wells. But Godell's life is soon in danger, as greater corporate forces move in to silence his whistle-blowing, culminating in a final confrontation between information and cover-up in the Ventana control room.

The China Syndrome sparkles with the understated cleverness of reality. Director James Bridges (who also co-wrote the script) eschews the  use of soundtrack music and never allows any of his characters to take on larger than life heroic proportions. Wells does not hide her vanity and acknowledges that although she is interested in serious stories, career climbing is just as important. Adams is a short-tempered and foul-mouthed idealist, destined to remain on the margins of influence. Even Godell, who could have been the most heroic of characters, falls apart at his critical moment.

The colourful details of life in a television newsroom are a delight, and the film avoids allowing the unfolding story to detract from the eccentricities of daily living, Wells struggling with her pet turtle as she answers the phone being typical of the depth that the film pursues to the end.

Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas (who also produced the movie) provide a large dose of star power, and all three deliver controlled performances, staying within themselves and avoiding diva moments. The performances are key to enliven and maintain interest in what is mostly a talkfest: the brilliance of The China Syndrome lies in uncovering the threat of something horrible potentially happening at the nuclear plant -- nothing drastically wrong ever actually does happen, but lives are nevertheless lost in the battle between revealing and hiding information.

And while the nuclear angle rightfully gets all the attention, The China Syndrome not only predicted the age of nuclear power nightmares, it more tellingly foretold the era of the media cozying up ever closer to corporate interests and forgoing hard stories for soft puff pieces.

The China Syndrome is a richly successful example of one of the most difficult challenges that fictional movies can undertake: provocative investigations of potentially dangerous trends packaged in captivating entertainment.






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Sunday 17 April 2011

Movie Review: Raging Bull (1980)


The true story of middleweight champion boxer Jake LaMotta, Raging Bull chronicles a life that passes through boxing's glory and agony. Single-minded ambition combined with a dense self-centred personality and an inability to connect with anyone except at the business end of a fist ensured that LaMotta experienced the highs and the lows with equal intensity. Raging Bull is also a career highlight for Robert De Niro and director Martin Scorsese.

We meet Jake (De Niro) as a young fighter in the early 1940's, as he slowly makes a name for himself in low-level bouts. From a poor Bronx background, Jake has a short temper and suspicious personality that allows him to easily abuse his first wife and maintain only an edgy relationship with his loyal brother Joey (Joe Pesci). Jake has a thunderous punch and the ability to survive terrible beatings without being knocked-down.

His reputation rises with a series of victories, and his personal life seems to take a turn for the better when he courts and marries Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), a young beauty from the neighbourhood. Jake believes that he is good enough to earn a title fight, and has the ambition to match his uncompromising fighting style. Never knocked down but with a mixed record, he takes on Sugar Ray Robinson in a series of fights that enhance his standing in the boxing world.

Despite blatantly throwing a fight to appease local crime lords, he eventually becomes world middleweight champion. But even at the top of the world Jake's insane jealousy means that he can trust no one, least of all Vickie and Joey. From the heights of success he has a long way to fall, as his personal life collapses and his career ends with mounting weight problems. He opens and operates a nightclub, but this lands him in jail after he unwittingly allows young girls to prostitute themselves out of his establishment. The story ends in 1964, with Jake establishing a niche for himself as an after-dinner entertainer.

Scorsese directs Raging Bull in brilliant black and white and using almost exclusively mid-range and close-up shots, as he delves deeply and at close quarters into the life and emotions of LaMotta. The movie is about the thin line between the forces that govern spectacular success and stunning failure; and boxing as a perfect metaphor. LaMotta's combative power and determination took him to the top; his inability to relate to others except through the lens of confrontation ensured his undoing. Scorsese makes sure that his cameras are never far from any of the forces, and LaMotta's life is portrayed as equally brutal inside and outside the ring. The graphic scenes of boxing violence are brutally intense, the black and white cinematography enhancing the sweat, blood and agony of close quarters combat between men of monstrous willpower.

De Niro gives one of the performances of his career, convincingly bringing LaMotta to life from a young man to a chastened but unremorseful fallen hero, capturing the right amount of drive and human failings without ever appearing to act. Filled with honest brooding intensity, the performance earned him the Academy Award as Best Actor for 1980. Opposite De Niro's LaMotta, Joey and Vickie are the only other major characters in the film. Joe Pesci became a leading character actor with his performance as Joey, and established the outline of the persona that he would perfect in GoodFellas ten years later, also alongside De Niro and Scorsese. Cathy Moriarty's debut as Vickie is memorable but unfortunately relatively statuesque.

Raging Bull is a timeless classic, the story of man's sometimes desperate struggle to control the potent conflicting forces that lie within, and that can both construct and destroy destiny.






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Movie Review: Spartacus (1960)


The story of a slave revolt in Italy in the last century before Christ, Spartacus is a grand Hollywood spectacle, filled with a long list of stars and an army of extras. In addition to the grandeur, director Stanley Kubrick creates compelling characters engaging in surreptitious sparring for political dominance.

Strong-willed slave and gladiator-in-training Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) inspires the slaves of Italy to revolt and pursue their dream of freedom. The slaves organize themselves into an army, create a functioning society and march across the country. Meanwhile, behind-the-scenes plotting and backstabbing erupts in Rome, as conniving general Crassus (Laurence Olivier), sleazy senator Grachuss (Charles Laughton), emerging military leader Julius Caesar (John Gavin), and naive commander Glabrus (John Dall) use the slave rebellion to try and outmanoeuvre each other in a great power struggle.

A combination of epic thrills and political gamesmanship, Spartacus has surprisingly few all-out action scenes, as Kubrick keeps the focus on characters and motives. Strong men exert authority and influence both in the countryside and the corridors of government in a stirring display of what it takes to shift the course of history, either for the greater good or personal advancement. Extras are deployed in grand canvasses portraying the journey of the slave army to the Italian shore seeking a naval passage to freedom, but also on a collision course with the Roman legions.


Kubrick also provides due attention to the romance between Spartacus and the slave girl Varinia (an earnest Jean Simmons) to humanize the otherwise larger than life protagonist.

Two less powerful but more memorable characters steal several scenes: Peter Ustinov won an Academy Award for his turn as Betiatus, a slave dealer and gladiator trainer who finds himself having to draw on his substantial shrewdness to survive as he is sucked into the political battle in Rome. Tony Curtis wanders into the movie as Antoninus, a slave boy who escapes his master Crassus and joins the rebellion, becoming a trusted advisor to Spartacus. A restored scene, with master Crassus in the bath seducing his slave Antoninus by talking about oysters and snails, is a sneaky attempt at censor evasion.

The narrative eventually narrows down to a battle of wits between Crassus and Spartacus, and with the weight of the Roman Empire's military might on the side of Crassus, the outcome is never in doubt. Spartacus needs to be satisfied with his men's enormous displays of loyalty, culminating in the "I am Spartacus!" classic scene, and a more hopeful future for the next generation.

Both as an intimate portrayal of courage and a sweep-of-history spectacle, Spartacus thunders with conviction.






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Movie Review: First Knight (1995)


Yest another interpretation of the King Arthur legend, First Knight is Arthur-light.

Featuring a mildly nauseating relationship between Sean Connery's King Arthur and Julia Ormond's Guinevere, Arthur is a full 35 years older than his great love, and to no surprise, there is no passion but lots of ick between Connery and Ormond. This Guinevere is much more interested in Lancelot, played by a long-haired Richard Gere as a dashing, carefree, personal-freedom loving expert swordsman. Director Richard Zucker works hard to generate some sparks between Ormond and Gere, and ultimately some passion emerges, but it's all at the level of superficial infatuation driven by Hollywood heroics.

Christopher Cross as the evil Prince Malagant pops up at appropriate moments to snarl his way through the movie as the designated bad guy, dressed all in black to make the point, and while he thinks he's after control of Camelot, what he is really doing is placing Guinevere in a succession of damsel-in-distress situations from which Lancelot can heroically rescue her to move their love story along.

Prince Malagant has split from King Arthur and is seeking to establish his own dominion by all means necessary. While the wise old Arthur is all about shared democracy and doing good for the people, the young and aggressive Malagant is only about hard-nosed leadership delivered by the sword, aimed initially at the heart of Leonesse, the territory ruled by Guinevere. Lancelot cares only for his personal freedom and not much else, but finds himself helping Arthur and lusting after Guinevere. And yes, it all sounds remarkably like Obi Wan, Darth Vader, Princess Leia and Han Solo transplanted to medieval England.

Gere makes no attempt at a British accent, but he and Connery are never less than watchable, and their presence gives William Nicholson's average script enough weight to be tolerable. Without the megawatt stars, First Knight would have been conclusively third rate.






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Sunday 3 April 2011

Movie Review: Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)


A sequel that stays tight to the course charted by the original, Resident Evil: Apocalypse picks up the futuristic story of the zombie infection caused by the T-Virus as it spreads through Raccoon City.

Alice (Milla Jovovich) emerges from a hospital facility run by the Umbrella corporation, where she has been kept sedated and injected with managed doses of the virus to change her DNA and turn her into a more proficient fighting machine. Alice finds chaos on the streets of Raccoon City: the virus is spreading uncontrollably and most of the population is infected. The zombies have taken over the streets. In response, Umbrella seals the city, leaving Alice and other survivors trapped along with the remnants of military teams who were trying to help quell the outbreak.

Alice teams up with disgraced former police officer Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), and a few military types and other survivors. Alice is contacted by Umbrella scientist Dr. Ashford, the T-Virus creator who has been extracted out of Raccoon City but needs help to rescue his trapped daughter Angela. In return for saving Angela, Ashford will help Alice find a way out of the carnage. Finding and rescuing Angela means killing many more zombies, infected dogs, and other evil beings, and matters are complicated when Umbrella unleashes a heavily armed Nemesis monster (another T-Virus related experiment) to add to the chaos, along with plans to nuke the city.

Moving the action from the artificial Hive underground facility to the urban environment provides Apocalypse with less of a designed video game feel, but also makes it indistinguishable from most other zombies-on-the-loose movies. To compensate, Apocalypse benefits from adding Guillory as the ultra-cool and seriously deadly Jill Valentine. The tandem of Guillory and Jovovich manage to simultaneously celebrate women as the main zombie-killing heroines, and entrench the credentials of the Resident Evil series as a young male adult fantasy.

Wrapped in a polished-enough package, Apocalypse delivers exactly what it promises: mild entertainment in the form of mindless zombie killing action, adding little that is new but not leaving out any of the admittedly limited elements demanded by the genre.






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Movie Review: Resident Evil (2002)


A futuristic zombie movie based on a video game series, Resident Evil contains plenty of action, some mild shocks, numerous extras doing the zombie walk, and buckets of inoffensive special effects.

It's the future, and The Umbrella corporation is the world's largest and most dangerous corporation. In an underground weapons research facility called the Hive, the lethal and highly infectious chemical agent known as the T-Virus is released by an intruder. The 500 researchers at the facility are infected and killed, but the virus provides enough of a kick to keep the dead moving and seeking blood -- chemical zombies of sorts. The central computer that runs the Hive, nicknamed the Red Queen, shuts down the place to avoid the infection spreading to the surface, where residents of the large Raccoon City metropolis are unaware that the Hive even exists below them.

An Umbrella military team is sent into the Hive to clean up the mess, and they take with them Alice (Milla Jovovich), head of the Hive's security but suffering from amnesia. They are soon engaged in running battles with hordes of hungry zombies, deranged dogs, and even more dangerous large pink creatures with long tongues. To make matters worse the Red Queen does not appreciate the intrusion and activates her defence systems. The military team is decimated; Alice fights for survival and gradually uncovers her role in the conspiracy that resulted in the bloody mess.

Video games rarely translate well to the big screen, since games are built for active player engagement while movies are a much more passive experience. Resident Evil adds just enough plot and characterization to hold itself together as a movie, and director Paul W. S. Anderson throws massive amounts of mayhem and some humour at the screen to cover up the lack of substance. Milla Jovovich fulfills her function as eye candy in the form of an action doll, but casting an actress with limited range as a character suffering from amnesia is just asking for an overdose of blank stares. Michelle Rodriguez as a member of the military team is a much more animated and engaging zombie ass-kicker.

Resident Evil does not pretend to be anything other than a pseudo-science evil corporation zombie movie targeted at a young male audience. It achieves its objectives, but the bar is set quite low.






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