The only thing lamer than zombies as far as I’m concerned is zombies with four-part octopus mouths.
Canadian/German co-production…blah-blah-blah…trapped…blah-blah-blah…fighting…monsters…blah-fucking-blah.
The Story gets a +1, the Look gets a +3 as it was pretty great green-screen work. The Overall Casting gets a +1 because some of the cast was good, most were bad. The Commitment to Genre scores a +2 because it is what it is.
Subtotal: +7
Let the slicing and dicing begin:
As I said at the beginning, I don’t care for zombies but octopus-mouthed zombies are just stupid (-1). That and the big cat-like monster with the exposed brain is fucking retarded! Why would something evolve to be so exposed with one of it’s most vulnerable parts with no protection? Shit (-1). The leader guy is sooooo awful (-1)! He looks like the star of one of the soft-porn movies. The rest of the supporting cast just stinks (-1) with the exceptions of the Ada Wong (Bingbing Li) and Becky (Aryana Engineer). The dead people laying around don’t look dead (-1). Milla Jovovich (playing Alice) is hot and dangerous as always but they had her running through this whole movie in high-heeled boots! While she was good on them, she also kind of moved like ED209 from Robocop (-1) and I found it a bit distracting.
Let’s end on a high-note: Milla, Milla, Milla. I’ve loved Milla Jovovich since she was on Married with Children. Even more since the 5th Element (I was at a comic con once where there were some girls dressed in Milla’s 5th Element white strappy outfit, that looked like boiled eggs in an egg-slicer). Even more since The Messenger. Even more when I saw her sing an impassioned acoustic song about a dog being hit by a car. A little less because of the lie that was the Fourth Kind. But she’s always a fun Black Widow-like character as Alice in the Resident Evil movies. Because of Milla as the Black Widow I’ll award it a point (+1). Milla looking like an older Taylor Swift in red-head clone scene earns another point (+1). Because of Milla dressed in two paper-towels I’ll award it another point (+1).
All in all, it’s got some entertainment value but relies too heavily on it’s association with a video game and tries too hard to feel like a game.
Total: +4.
I remember watching this appearance on the Carson Daly show in 2002. At one point he makes a “oh shit, what have I got myself into” face but then when the audience applauds, he loves it. I think that this is a real testament to her talents.
I’ve never seen The Messenger, but recently I saw the clip from the movie with Jean thrown into a dungeon. She is visited by a character played by Dustin Hoffman, a character known only as The Conscience. He proceeds to quietly deconstruct all of her supposed signs from god in a devastating manner. It was incredibly compelling, and has me thinking that I might want to watch the whole movie.
I really enjoyed it. It was on my Top 100 until recently when the competition became too fierce. She’s great in it and I liked it head and shoulders over the 5th Element which was also directed by her then-husband Luc Besson. A funny side-note, on the IMDb listing for the Messenger/Joan of Arc, the great Dustin Hoffman and the Conscience is listed 47th and the star, Milla Jovovich as Joan of Arc is listed 52nd!
Yeah, it’s funny… I think IMDb ranks the actors according to the amount of hits on their profile on the site, so you get strange things like recently where some extra who gets about 4 seconds of screen time was listed at the top of the credits for Jack Reacher, above even Xenu-slayer Tom Cruise himself!
Yeah, the Messenger IMDb top spot goes to Rab Affleck (probably no relation) who prior to playing “Comrade” in the Messenger played such groundbreaking roles such as “Lorry Driver”, “Chaperoning Officer” and “Big Man”. He looks like he could be the German who gets kicked in the crouch and barfs in the SNL “Sprocket” skit.
I am the Lord of the Obscure Reference!
Touch my monkey!
Anyway, to veer sharply back on topic, I haven’t seen Retribution either, but, and I think it at the theatre with you guys maybe, I was a bit interested in the movie by the trailer. It seems to start with Milla living a lovely live with husband and kids, no zombie virus or anything like that, and then everything slowly goes to shit around her. Seemed like one of those episodes of Star Trek I always like, where a character suddenly finds themselves in a reality that may or may not be real.
I guess you’re saying that it’s shittier than any shitty Trek episode, however.
The trailer was misleading because while that does happen in the film it is in the middle and begins as something of a dream sequence. That’s the older Taylor Swift scene I refer to in the review.