Review: Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

Director: Paul WS Anderson
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter
Rating: **

In a game, you don’t ask questions. Just pick up your weapon and start shooting any goddamn thing that looks bad. The Resident Evil film franchise, now in its fourth installment with Afterlife, clearly borrows its logic (or the lack of it) from its game equivalent. There’s all the blood and gore you expect, state-of-the-art graphics, and slow-mo fight sequences.

For once, here’s a movie you’re glad is in 3D, even if the pictures are still darker than ideal and the heavy fibre glasses (better than the paper ones though) are heavy as hell.

High points: Milla Jovovich (as Project Alice) and her new zombie-slaying partner, Ali Larter (as Claire Redfield). Jovovich has a standard menacing expression throughout, apt perhaps for the last hero in a post-apocalyptic world. Larter has the expressions of a plastic doll. But who cares, when you can kick butt looking as hot as she does? Leather-wearing, gun and sword wielding, the two of them could have had not one word to say, and still been enough reason (perhaps the only reason) to watch the movie.

Predictably, there’s not much effort at storytelling. Alice seeks revenge against Umbrella Corporation and Albert Wesker (yeah, that dude in the dark glasses) who are responsible for the deadly T-Cell experiment that made zombies and led to the present apocalypse. But early in the film, Alice loses her superpowers and becomes human again. The only difference is that there’s just one Jovovich for the rest of the film and not the dozen who appear in the first fight sequence. She can still walk away unscathed from a plane bursting into flames (leather suit, hair and make-up intact), jump off buildings and shoot through a field full of killer zombies.

If you’re asking why such films are made, you’re asking the wrong question. Sit back, enjoy the effects, enjoy the fact that Jovovich and Larter make guns sexier than Schwarzenegger ever could. Think of it as a video game and you might just like it. If you still don’t like it, go play Farmville instead.

- Sarit Ray

Review: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

An unfair thing to say about a film, perhaps, but nostalgia makes for good marketing. It’s probably why you watched This Is It. It’s why you’ll watch Terry Gilliam’s (now thankfully complete) The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, even as it releases in India nearly eight months after opening at international cinemas.

But that’s not to say Gilliam’s fantasy doesn’t impress. It follows the rather absurd story of a travelling dance troupe whose thousand-year-old leader Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), takes audience members through a magic mirror to make the eternal choice between good and evil.

But it’s no scam, as Ledger’s character Tony Shepherd finds out. The mirror is a Carrol-esque tunnel to Wonderland, a dreamscape of video games, giant pearls and pumps, or for Tony, ladders to reach the clouds. Points to Gilliam’s fantasy world for impressing even without 3D.
The doctor, we learn, was a monk and a storyteller – hence the reference to Mount Parnassus, the mythological home of poetry and music. He also likes a drink and a bet, so pretty much your ideal flawed Faustus figure to wager with the devil (played by Tom Waits) for immortality and youth.

Inside the mirror, Tony has different faces, namely those of Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Collin Farrell, who stepped in to complete Imaginarium after Ledger’s death midway through the filming. Sure, it demands a certain suspension of disbelief. Nevertheless the very Hollywood workaround does add to the film’s surrealism – even if Farrell ends up stealing the show from Ledger in the final scene.

- Sarit Ray

This review was originally written for gqindia.com (Click here to see...)