Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

There's a moment in Resident Evil: Afterlife where a character emerges from a prison cell, announces himself as Chris Redfield, and we're apparently supposed to care deeply. We don't. We can't. We know nothing about him, the film tells us nothing about him, and the performance gives us nothing to work with either. That one scene, right there, is a perfect little window into everything that's wrong with this film.

By the time we reach the fourth entry in a franchise that was already stretching its credibility thin, something has gone seriously wrong. I've sat through Resident Evil: Apocalypse and Resident Evil: Extinction, and neither of those are what you'd call high cinema, but they at least had a certain scrappy energy and some nominal interest in their own story. Afterlife can't even be bothered with that. This is a film that has drifted so far from its origins it doesn't know what it is anymore, and more importantly, it doesn't seem to care.

What it has instead is slow-motion gun-fu, wall-to-wall 3D gimmicks, and a plot so threadbare it barely qualifies as a narrative. The action sequences arrive not because anything in the story demands them, but because the runtime needs filling. One set piece lurches into the next with zero regard for logic, cause-and-effect, or basic character motivation. If you're a longtime fan of this series who's willing to forgive a lot, this one will still leave you baffled. If you're coming in fresh, God help you.

Milla Jovovich sleepwalks through the whole thing, delivering wooden exposition between action poses. She's done better work in this very series, but here she seems to be operating on autopilot. The real offenders, though, are Ali Larter and Wentworth Miller as Claire and Chris Redfield. Their performances are so devoid of chemistry or emotional truth that their long-awaited sibling reunion lands with all the weight of two strangers bumping into each other at a supermarket. Their bond is treated as an afterthought, meaningful only on paper, assumed rather than earned. Claire has barely been established in the previous film, and Chris simply materialises from a prison cell with zero context. He's just some bloke called Chris Redfield. The average viewer has absolutely no idea who that is, and the film makes no effort whatsoever to tell them.

Then there's the monster problem. The film randomly imports creatures from the Resident Evil 5 videogame, including a hulking, axe-wielding brute and Ouroboros-infected zombies, and drops them into proceedings without explanation or integration. They're just there. Why? How? The honest answer is that they looked impressive in the game. But this isn't the game. You can't simply paste in iconography and expect it to carry dramatic weight it hasn't been given. Even fans of the games are left scratching their heads, because the internal logic of the film's own mythology, flimsy as it already was, can't absorb them.

This is the fundamental failure at the heart of Afterlife: it mistakes fan service for storytelling. It assumes familiarity with game lore while simultaneously ignoring that very lore's own rules. It wants credit for including Chris Redfield and Claire Redfield and Umbrella Corporation and all the rest of it, without doing the work of making any of those things mean something within the film you're actually watching. Spectacle is used as a substitute for substance at every turn, and it doesn't work for a single second.

I mentioned it's the fourth film in the series. There's a fifth and a sixth still to come, and I've already seen what Resident Evil: Retribution looks like. None of this gets better. But even knowing that, even accounting for where this franchise ends up, Afterlife stands out as a particular low point, because it's the film where the series stopped trying to be anything coherent at all. It's not just bad. It's disorienting, self-contradictory, and alienating in equal measure to general audiences and fans alike.

One star, and I'm being generous with the sentiment.

Rating: ★  | Year: 2010  | Watched: 2026-04-24

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