Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)

There's a moment in Resident Evil: Extinction when a swarm of undead crows descends on a convoy of survivors in the Nevada desert, and I'll be honest, it genuinely got me. It's absurd, it's chaotic, and it's pulled off with a kind of scrappy ambition that reminds you big ideas don't always need big budgets to land. That sequence alone is worth something. It's just a shame the film around it can't quite match that energy consistently.

By this third instalment, any pretence of survival horror has been quietly buried in the sand alongside whatever remained of the games' DNA. We're firmly in post-apocalyptic action territory now, Mad Max dustbowl aesthetics colliding with something closer to 28 Days Later than anything Capcom ever intended. For anyone who came to this franchise hoping it might one day honour its source material, that's a sting that doesn't really go away. For everyone else, it's a perfectly serviceable zombie action romp with a superpowered heroine and an impressive body count.

What genuinely works here is the look of the thing. The desert setting, all bleached skies and cracked earth, gives Extinction a visual identity its predecessors didn't have. And the practical makeup on the zombies is legitimately impressive. Decayed, feral, grotesque in the right ways. There's a tactile nastiness to the creature design that CGI-heavy horrors rarely manage, and director Russell Mulcahy brings a slick, sun-scorched energy to the convoy sequences and large-scale attacks that keeps the pace up even when the script starts to sag.

But the script does sag. Milla Jovovich commits physically, as she always does in this franchise, throwing herself into every punch and pyrokinetic explosion with total conviction. The trouble is nobody's given her anything interesting to say, and the relationships between characters feel so thinly sketched that when people start dying, it's hard to feel much beyond a mild acknowledgement that the cast is getting smaller. The supporting players mostly exist to look worried and then get eaten. It's efficient, I suppose, but it's not exactly engaging.

The bigger structural problem is that the plot's central idea, around the possibility of controlling or domesticating the infected, is doing a fairly obvious impression of George A. Romero's Day of the Dead. That film is a genuinely chilling, thematically rich piece of work. Here, the same concept gets grafted onto the story as a backdrop for set pieces rather than anything with real weight behind it. The science is hand-wavy even by zombie movie standards, and whatever emotional stakes the film is reaching for never quite catch light.

I've stayed with this franchise longer than most would recommend, so if you want the full picture of where things go from here, I've written about Resident Evil: Afterlife, Resident Evil: Retribution (2012) and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter as well. Each one is a slightly different experiment in how far a franchise can stretch before it loses all structural integrity. Extinction is the point where the stretching becomes unmistakeable, but it hasn't snapped yet.

And that's essentially where I land on it. It's not a good film in any meaningful critical sense, but it's a competent, occasionally exciting B-movie that knows what it is and mostly delivers on those modest terms. The zombie crow sequence is brilliant. The dialogue is rough. The borrowed ideas are half-digested. The whole thing rattles along at pace and then ends on a cliffhanger that made me roll my eyes and queue up the next one anyway. Make of that what you will.

Three stars.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2007  | Watched: 2026-04-21

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Russell Mulcahy: Highlander (1986)
More with Milla Jovovich: Resident Evil: Retribution (2012) · Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016) · Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) · The Fourth Kind (2009)
More from Canada: History of the World in Three Minutes Flat (1980) · Resident Evil: Retribution (2012) · Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016) · Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)
More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)