All Good Things Become Average, But It's Better Than Trash

Movie Title: "Resident Evil: Afterlife" (2010)
Writer & Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

Commercialised, cliché, over-done and typically American, but still built from the bones of the original, this movie proved to be better than I heard it was on the grapevine. Milla Jovovich ("The 5th Element", "Ultraviolet") and Ali Larter ("Heroes", "Legally Blonde") return as Alice and Claire in the fourth installment of the "Resident Evil" series, which lives up to it's predecessors despite the obvious amount of Hollywood which has seeped into it. With many scenes looking like something out of "The Matrix", and the use of 3D (although thankfully this wasn't overdone like it seems to be in everything else these days - "Alice In Wonderland" and "Avatar" left me feeling sick), much of this movie was just acrobatic stunts and explosions, but Anderson kept the storyline strong. Beginning with a destructive battle at Japan's Umbrella Headquarters, Alice then starts her search for the elusive Arcadia, a safe-haven supposedly free from infection, and the place where her companions from Extinction should be located. Instead of Arcadia, Alice finds a near-savage Claire, who has lost all but snippets of her memory, and they head to Los Angeles in search of survivors and information. They join up with another band of survivors, including "Prison Break" star Wentworth Miller, in an abandoned prison, and continue to fight the (evolving?) mutants. From here on they make for the elusive Arcadia, but what they find isn't what they expected. There aren't a lot of twists and turns in this movie, with Alice and her nemesis, Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), having many a cliché, acrobatic face-off, and the mutants being, as always, annoying and everywhere, but it was still a lot of good fun, and it was nowhere near as disappointing as I had been told by my more judgemental friends.
Even if you aren't a huge fan of the "Resident Evil" series, this is a good film to see, especially for those who thrive on special effects and slow-mo fights.
I'll give this one a 7/10.

Oh, and a little teaser too, the ending leaves it open for a fifth!