Milla Jovovich again won me over, and though I formerly assumed that my instantaneous hatred of her stemmed from her ridiculous performance in The Fifth Element, I now see that it's really because she looks surprisingly like my older brother! So I'm OK with Milla. She kicks a lot of ass and negotiates the frequently preposterous situations with grace. In this one, she's almost superhuman, having been infected with a "massive dose" of the virus that turns everyone else into zombies. In one scene she fends off multiple opponents while cinching a sheet around her body with one hand! There's an additional ass-kicker named Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) who also manages to shoot the shit out of everything while wearing a tight skirt and hot boots. A smack-talkin' Black guy hangs around for comic relief, and there's a little girl with a British accent for pathos, or cuteness, or something. Though the first half-hour seems like a nearly shot-for-shot remake of the Dawn of the Dead remake, and also throws in a couple of scenes copped from 28 Days Later, it soon establishes its own unique contributions to the zombie genre by introducing the simply awesome monster called Nemesis, who is just the most bad-ass villain I've seen in a horror movie in a very long time. Also, there are some zombie schoolchildren, and topless zombie strippers (!), which are both novel and welcome twists. Many scenes, too, of zombies run-stumbling through the streets in large numbers, so if you use your imagination, you can pretend you're watching my frequent-fantasy film Zombie Marathon. And more zombie dogs! Some of the plot developments are completely absurd (such as our heroes walking through a cemetery, whereupon the dead all rise from their graves, for some reason), but the pace is so fierce that you can't really worry about silly things like meaning. Things build toward almost total nihilism at the end, when we get a good old-fashioned Day After-style nukin'! Having not read the Nobel prize-winning novels on which these films were based, I can't say whether they depart much from the original storylines, or take away at all from the overall impact of the author's statement. What, they were based on videogames? Oh, yeah, well, that makes more sense.
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