Starring: Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Eric Mabius, Oded Fehr

3 out of 10 stars

John Wayne was known for his swagger. Clint Eastwood his squint. Milla Jovovich, if she's known to later generations at all, will be remembered for those countless scenes where she woke up naked, disoriented, and incoherent.

Her hair in wavy--never frizzy--curls she bats away at those that try to touch her head and hair (always they try to touch her head and hair!) with wild "who took my work laptop—where's my meth?" eye rolls. With her knees curled up toward her breasts, some flimsy garment draped around her, and her feet together and arched like a pinup girl, she looks for the guy with the cattle prod. That's her signature.

Milla gets plenty of chances to use her calling card in the lamentable Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Milla plays Alice, one of the only survivors of the first film. She was a special agent sent into The Hive, an underground test facility where a virus broke out, causing the dead to reanimate and act like zombies. The zombies can infect the living by biting them, which they do only if they're precluded from eating them.

Alice awakens in this film (naked, disoriented and incoherent) as the virus has escaped the confines of the Hive and taken over Raccoon City above. The Umbrella Corporation, that created the disease in the first place, as a sort of biotechnical weapon, seal off the city and evacuate their executives and scientists. They abandon those not infected, including a large amount of policemen, special Umbrella agents, and those that wander the city streets wearing nothing but hospital sheets (Alice).

One of those left behind is Jill Valentine (a thief in the game, here a crack cop) who is handy at dispatching the zombies and does so ruthlessly and effectively. For the first five minutes she's the only one who appears to understand what's going on, or to be the only one who's ever seen a zombie movie. For the rest of the time, she's pretty much an idiot. She's played by Sienna Guillory, who does indeed come across well. She carries the requisite butt-kicking duties with panache.

Jill attempts to leave the city with TV reporter Terri Morales (Sandrine Holt), her buddy on the force, Peyton Wells (Razaaq Adoti), who has been bitten, and a wise-cracking street-smart hood named L.J. (Mike Epps, at least enjoyable). They soon band together with Alice when they're attacked in a church by brain beasts (I'm sure they have some name from the game, but I've no idea what it is, and we're given no further indication where they came from). Joined by other Umbrella agents--also left to fend for themselves--they're given the mission to rescue the daughter of Umbrella's lead scientist, Dr. Ashford (Jared Harris) and then get out before the whole city is nuked

Frightening moments pop up in Resident Evil like bad guys on a rookie cop's urban training course. It's effective but suffers from diminishing returns. You know the brand of surprise, you're just unsure what part of the screen it's coming from. And it keeps happening, again and again, and again. "Glad we got out of there!" "Rowwwrrr!!!"

Director Alexander Witt, a director of photography by experience, does know how to light a dark corridor and he does use the scope of the full screen. He's probably varied the angles each zombie, brain beast, mutated child, ravenous dogs, come from with mathematical precision.

Sadly, he's not deft at combining the macho first-shooter moments, with the purportedly scary zombie moments, with the action scenes. Though there's a lot of shooting, no one acts scared, or makes a mistake or acts like a human. The live ones are as unbelievable as the dead ones, maybe more so.