Oh wow. It’s not often you get to wit­ness the cel­lu­loid face of bore­dom, tedium, out-right ridicu­lous­ness and balls to the wall crap.

I had this plea­sure how­ever and, although in recent times we have wit­nessed more flops than ever, I was not expect­ing such a stinker as Res­i­dent Evil: Extinc­tion (which is iron­i­cally exactly what they did to this fran­chise — con­sciously or not.)

In try­ing to sum-up what it is exactly that turned this could-a-been into a giant turkey is near impos­si­ble as basi­cally every fab­ric of this motion pic­ture (ahem) is cel­lu­loid turd.

From the out­set, we’re faced with a Mad Max sort of world where a cheesily expos­i­tory nar­ra­tor (here, it’s the char­ac­ter of Alice her­self), tells us the world has gone to Hell in a hand bas­ket and it’s all because of the evil Umbrella Cor­po­ra­tion — again.

After some flat, shock-value crap about Alice-cloning and a thou­sand zom­bies who can’t break down a chicken-wire fence, we’re re-introduced to our hero­ine. She rides along on a painfully prod­uct placed BMW two-wheeler before cack­les on her wire­less tell her there may be some­one around, some­one not likely to eat her flesh. She tracks the com­mu­niqué to — coin­ci­den­tally — a radio sta­tion. Where it turns out it was a trap and our Alice suc­cumbs to the boy­ish, buck-toothed, inbred charms of a fam­ily straight out of The Texas Chain­saw Mas­sacre (appar­ently stereo­types are not above a post-apocalyptic world.)

Our Ninja-chick fights free and man­ages to turn the family’s pet rabid-dogs (um, why?) on them and escapes to the free­dom of the desert. Mean­while we’re intro­duced to a con­voy of sur­vivors led by Sarah Con­nor. Oh, that wasn’t her? Damn, I guess Mr. Uno­rig­i­nal struck again. This merry band of cliché cannon-fodder comes upon a motel. One gets bit. He hides his bite. No-one notices. See; never saw that com­ing did you!

So any­way, Alice is dream­ing beside her set-made fire when she has dreams and sud­denly we’re intro­duced to one of the most A-rate stu­pid fuck­ing details ever intro­duced to the third act of a character’s story — she’s PSYCHIC! Wow, how cool? I’m afraid this just doesn’t make sense — not that much else does in this wafer-thin plop — as I don’t recall Alice ever show­ing signs that she was/is/has been psy­chic… like at all. EVER!

She breaks her bike inci­den­tally out of sleepy-self un-control and sud­denly the paths between the two groups of char­ac­ters con­verge. As this occurs, the ‘pos­si­bly’ younger sis­ter of Sarah Con­nor (okay, the character’s name is Claire) notices, wait for it… evil ravens — or crows — land­ing all around. Ooo, shit your pants scary. Every­one begins to notice and sud­denly we’re shown some highly cheesy spe­cial effects involv­ing thou­sands of black­birds smash­ing win­dows and attack­ing the survivors.

It’s quite apt at this point to note that the spe­cial effects are really bad. I mean, obvi­ously and unin­ten­tion­ally fake and copy/pasted on. Guh, it’s so bad it’s not even funny — it’s, surprising.

Alice shows up to save the day of course and uses her mag­i­cal pow­ers to fend off the evil pigeons. It’s worth a men­tion that the Mex­i­can soldier-guy from RE 1 & 2 is wedged into the con­voy… Cos­mos or Car­los or what­ever his name is. Though I’m sure he’s more Middle-Eastern than South­ern Cross­ing. Anywho…

So, psy­chic abil­i­ties, stu­pid plans, bad ideas and the infected black dude from Res­i­dent Evil 2: Apoc­a­lypse and we’re all set to intro­duce our PLOT. Yes, now it’s time — a lit­tle late, no?

The plot involves some stu­pid diary found in a gas sta­tion by Alice ear­lier in the day. Some­how some­one at this pump-house could pick-up trans­mis­sions from Alaska (this is Nevada where you’re lucky to get an AT&T sig­nal let alone some fart-out from Canada’s hat). These mes­sages were noted and now Alice wants to truck north a gazil­lion miles because she believes unin­fected peo­ple are there. Queue pas­sion and maybe a tear. I’m sorry but Ms. Jovovich isn’t going to win an Oscar on this one.

Car­los – as now I recall his name being – is obvi­ously in sup­port. “Give them hope,” he says. Give them a break, I say. The last thing these peo­ple need is psy­chic Alice and her cam­ou­flage fish­nets. But wait, they need gas! The car­di­nal rule of the sur­vival hand­book they all seem to have read has to be bro­ken… they need to ven­ture into a major city: Viva Las Vegas.

I think at this point flash­backs to the Umbrella Cor­po­ra­tion are in heavy pres­ence, but the con­stant reminders that evil sci­ence is, well evil and some guy wear­ing shades whilst in-doors turned it into one big blur. There is a sort-of main evil guy that’s been exper­i­ment­ing on re-humansing zom­bies (some­thing which turns them into hooli­gans unfor­tu­nately) but that’s only to neces­si­tate a final show­down that falls flat like the paper-thin char­ac­ters it’s between.

Some­how — I need a moment to cough sar­cas­ti­cally — these bad men of sci­ence track down Alice (via some­thing we’ll call psy­chic farts as that’s about as deep as it gets). They some­how man­age to out­ma­neu­ver Alice and the gang and on arriv­ing, our lit­tle con­voy of cow­boys, tough-chicks and military-men is attacked by a case-load of the hooligan-ed zom­bies men­tioned ear­lier. And let me tell you, I never knew a sin­gle ship­ping crate could hold five-hundred boiler-suited morons in bad prosthetics.

So they fight, some win, some… well most if not all die and Alice is nearly shut-down. Oh wait, I wan­dered into that one a lit­tle too eas­ily. Appar­ently as well as being psy­chic, a lit­tle older and the female ver­sion of a bad Mad Max look-y-like our hero­ine is some kind of woman that can be turned off with a sim­ple switch (men all over the world rejoice if such a thing existed ;) and the Umbrella Cor­po­ra­tion attempt to do this.

It doesn’t work though; she fights back, she uses all of her emo­tion and pas­sion and resis­tance to some­how turn it back on them and find out where they are (on-top of a nearby build­ing pro­tected from zom­bies under a tarp – how safe.) Quickly dis­patch­ing them, Alice has the brain­storm of using the bad-guy heli­copter to fly to Alaska after all.

Genius, heli­copters must fly on piss and wind in this dystopian future as the need for gas seems sud­denly obso­lete. At this point they move out – leav­ing the dead and get­ting deader – and for­mu­late some hair-brained scheme to ram­rod the Umbrella facil­i­ties pro­tec­tive chicken-fence with a truck and blow it up – this involves a now-bitten Car­los who oddly turns to the dark side quicker than his ghetto brother coun­ter­part (dead back in Vegas).

Any­way, it some­how works (no idea) and Alice gets to the heli­copter with Sarah Con­nor, her mini-me and some other redun­dant extras. But Alice sees the clones, her clones, the clones, her clones!!! Sorry, I’m try­ing to make this as dra­matic as I can as the orig­i­nal rev­e­la­tion lands on its face as Milla Jovovich does her best to weep like a cut onion.

She just says no and tells the oth­ers to go on. A good ten bods aptly hop aboard the sin­gle copter and… we… never… see… them… again. What the fuck­ing point in that was I don’t know. Do they sur­vive? Do they crash? Are Cana­dian zom­bies even less ani­mated than their Amer­i­can counterparts?

What­ever, fuck it, mov­ing on. Alice descends into the Umbrella Corp (queue the fifth or sev­en­teenth time we see some nifty After Effects visual of a 3D under­ground blue­print), and she finds the labs and what­not ripped to crap. The evil sci­en­tist man got infected see, back in Vegas, and now he’s gone and done a silly and injected him­self with the hooligan-gene ther­apy. He’s now a pigeon-chested ele­phant man from the props department.

Red Queen pops up. She, we met in game – sorry — film num­ber one. There she was a plot device. Here, well who knows – another point­less endeav­our into obscure placement?

Alice comes across Mr. Hand­some and the two bat­tle it out in a copied ver­sion of her home from movie one. Wow, so clever… we’ve gone full cir­cle, the depth. She kills him by the way. Well she doesn’t, he dies in that infra-red cheese-wire machine from, again, movie one – the one that likes to slice and dice with com­pli­ment­ing lighting.

I think the film fades to black at this point, but really, who cares. Now we’re in Tokyo or some crap. It looks like peo­ple are okay there – unin­fected. Below the streets we find another Umbrella Corp facil­ity and our Corey Hart ‘I wear my sun­glasses at night’ man.

They’re talk­ing and talk­ing and sud­denly Alice appears. She’s pissed (angry, not ham­mered on stout), and tells them she – and a few friends – are com­ing for them. And who are the friends? Try a few dozen clones of Alice herself!

Fade to black, rinse and repeat. Per­haps in a cou­ple of years we’ll get a treat and they’ll make Res­i­dent Evil 4: Retarded. Seri­ously, these guys need to get a grip and fuck off.