In a world ravaged by a virus infection, turning its victims into the Undead, Alice, continues on her journey to find survivors and lead them to safety. Her deadly battle with the Umbrella Corporation reaches new heights, but Alice gets some unexpected help from an old friend. A new lead that promises a safe haven from the Undead takes them to Los Angeles, but when they arrive the city is overrun by thousands of Undead - and Alice and her comrades are about to step into a deadly trap.

I think somewhere along the way the Resident Evil franchise decided to abandon the casual viewer and just target its core audience and demographic. This can be a good thing sometimes but more often than not it means that a series has gone as far as its going to go and all they are now doing is making gratuitous movies and obvious cash grabs. The fourth installment of the Resident Evil franchise completely falls under the gratuitous category as there is very little plot to the movie, the characters are weak and barely formed and the film just seems to be an excuse to blow up zombies and have lots of explosions and violence. Resident Evil Afterlife is easily the weakest of the Resident Evil films and is also a very weak movie and zombie film for that matter as well.

The problems of the film can be boiled down most of the time to its plot or lack thereof. The film requires you to be a hardcore fan and remember where the other three films left off or be completely lost while watching the fourth installment. I have seen all three films but it has been awhile since I have seen them and I even felt lost at times as the whole film is just a carryover from the third film. The film really has no standalone plot of its own and is almost like a serialized television show expecting you to have seen last week’s episode to know what is going on in this week’s episode. That is just pure writing and completely abandons the casual viewer and even confuses those who have seen the movies.

Afterlife does have everything you would expect a zombie based movie to have though with plenty of action to fill in the areas that are lacking from the film having no story or plot. The problem is a lot of those effects and visuals were designed for the 3D theatres and if you are like me and decided to save your money of the cost of 3D the film loses some of what it was trying to shoot for. I am not a big fan of 3D anyways and there is no way having the film in a third dimension could have saved it from everything that was wrong with it. The only thing going for it was the action but that was expected from a video game based zombie film.

Milla Jovovich is like an old hand at the character of Alice by now and she fits very easily into the role once more. It’s a shame though that the film did nothing to add to her character though as she is nothing more than a cookie cutter action hero in the film with zero character depth as the film requires you to have seen the other installments to understand who Alice is. The film does try and fill the film with a few other roles but they are your cookie cutter action hero sidekicks and clichés in themselves. None really stood out before they got offed or you figured out that they would live long before the film actually shows them making it. Resident Evil Afterlife is a poor excuse for a sequel and makes sequels look bad, this movie is maybe worth a rental and that is about it.

Grade: D+