RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION [R]
Former supermodel Milla Jovovich must have been on a quest to make a movie worse than the super-unwatchable 2006 floater Ultraviolet, because this third and allegedly final movie in the most-definitely-not Shakespeare series about a secret experiment-turned-zombie plague is a real contender for that crown of scorn. Two-time Highlander director Russell Mulcahy stumbles from scene to scene in this video game adaptation, blissfully unaware that game-crazy writer Paul W.S. Anderson has ripped pages from J.G. Ballard’s 1981 sci-fi novel, Hello America, wiped with them and stitched the fetid result to a half-hearted homage to master George Romero’s Living Dead quartet of genre cornerstones. The action is tired and uninventive, and when the wooden cast, which features fearsome “Heroes” belle Ali Larter and ham-fisted comic Mike Epps, recites their lines, we half expect a light breeze to knock them over, they are so cardboard. Things get really stupid when a flock of flesh-eating crows descends upon a caravan of plague survivors as they motor across the desert to the remains of Las Vegas (like no one in the audience has seen The Birds before). They get even stupider still when a lone Jovovich, make-up perfect after five years fighting and fleeing hordes of undead, battles a mutant scientist who wants to put his tentacles in her (like no one in the audience has ever seen From Beyond before). Even stupider than that would be us carrion on any longer discussing such empty rot. –Robert Newton