It used to seem like it was always a third or fourth installment to a series where people spelled its impending doom. Well, there are several instances when it was clear that the series lost the plot just in the first sequel. It happened with Beastmaster, Pumpkinhead, and The Joker. Well, it also happened to Paul Anderson's Resident Evil. The writing was on the wall, although it wasn't as apparent as others. Apocalypse wasn't an especially bad movie, but it did make especially bad decisions that would later come back to bite it on the ass. Their biggest mistake was most assuredly Paul W.S. Anderson deciding to start a relationship and eventually marry Milla Jovovich. Normally, these sort of things can be overlooked but in this case, it was clearly a very large detriment to the series.
Every single decision made in this sequel and all of the impending installments had to service one thing: Alice's power and ego. She was the most amazing thing in this world, able to kill zombies without thinking about it and having an ego trip as a result. This all comes to a head when we are introduced to Jill Valentine, and she is never given a proper place to shine. She has her very awkward boss moment when she simply walks into the police station and puts two rounds into random people that she sees are transformed into zombies. This was jarring to say the least and painted a very good picture of what is to come in this movie.
Every single other character, from the T-virus's creator, his daughter and even Nemesis, are all there to either be victims or villains. Jill tries to keep her video game character's cool factor, but she constantly fails and needs Alice to bring her out of it. Alice has to save the creator's daughter, Angela Ashford. Her father is being held captive by Umbrella Corp and she apparently needs to be saved while she is hiding in a school. Along the way, we meet such colorful character as a pimp who serves as a very poor comedy relief, then there are the members of S.T.A.R.S., with whom are almost all killed by Nemesis.
Nemesis is about the only character they actually got right in this movie, but that is also one of the movie's big downfalls when the climax takes place. The big baddy, with hostages held at gunpoint, commands Alice to fight Nemesis in single combat. Yes, Alice has grown so powerful and skilled that she can even meet one of the strongest undead characters in Resident Evil hand to hand and actually come out on top. It really goes to show you that the director just can't stop bringing his own personal life into his work.
There is no reason that any of this should be the plot. The first movie got away with diverging from the video games because it actually had a fairly decent idea. The execution was shoddy, but it still formed a coherent enough plot and Alice was still just a regular fighter with trained skills. Here, she is overpowered and becomes a Mary Sue by the end of it because, somehow, her powers have become nigh omnipotent. Propping your hero up while bogging everyone down is already a horrendous practice, but this movie made her into near godhood. The way she runs through a window on her motorcycle with two machineguns and the way she literally defeats Nemesis with her own awesomeness became so boring! She was taken down, character-wise, while trying to prop her up as undefeatable.
The plot suffers from random happenings all over the city, which could be a neat little sideplot here and there, but with the reporter who comes to make a name for herself, only to be killed by zombie children, and a random guy feeding his sister humans because she turned into a zombie, plus the sideplot with the random S.T.A.R.S. members dying all over the place and everything else happening, this movie feels bloated. It's very difficult to recall much of anything that happens in this plot, or what the plot is even about, because there is just so much to it. This is made worse with the fact that Alice comes in exactly when she is needed and defeats the obstacle with ease, while also saving people and moving on as if it wasn't even worth acknowledging.
The real kicker is that the third movie is actually better than this one in many ways. It's still not that good, but it beats this constant trainwreck that doesn't seem to know where to draw the plot or how to even carry it through the movie. The ending only compounds all of this by giving Alice the ability to kill a random, innocent security guard through the security camera. No, I'm not making that up. She looks at a security camera, and the man watching on the other end has blood come out of every orafice in his face, seemingly melting his brain. She is somehow super charged after waking up in a science facility and killing her captors without thinking about it. Get used to that, folks, because this series loves to embellish her powers and make her out to be an unstoppable killing machine. The movies can't tell a coherent story and keep lining up ineffective villains who do their thing, say their lines and die because Alice wills it. It's a long 7 movie ride and it only gets longer from here. Virtua Sigh.
