I can’t say I remember what exactly happened in the first two Resident Evil movies, other than I watched them and didn’t dislike them enough to take a pass on Resident Evil: Extinction, likely part three of a series of five or eight. Based on a popular videogame, this is one of those second-tier franchises that, in a sneaky and undemanding way, can be more enjoyable than its classier counterparts.

Russell Mulcahy, the newest director in the fold, made the original Highlander. He is probably the best director to attempt a Resident Evil movie, and gives the film a more polished look than its predecessors. He isn’t exactly an original stylist, but the action is coherent and sometimes even striking: the film opens with an eerie, near-wordless sequence capped by an image that can only be described as a pile of Milla Jovovichs. Luckily, continuity is maintained by original Evil filmmaker Paul WS Anderson, screenwriter here and provider of much exposition and laughable dialogue to match the earlier films.

The story itself has its dirty charms. Since the events of the second film, Earth has been overrun by zombies and the United States is mainly desert. The newly genetically modified Alice (Milla Jovovich) rides her motorcycle around the wasteland, lying low to avoid her sinister creators, the Umbrella Corporation. Her former cohort Carlos (Oded Fehr) has joined a convoy of desperate survivors led by Claire (Ali Larter) and including Ashanti, one of the last humans left alive on the planet.

Meanwhile, Umbrella’s science guru Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen) continues his experiments in the hope of reversing, or at least controlling, the zombie plague his company unleashed back in the good old days of Resident Evil part one.

Milla Jovovich, as both Alice and her various ill-fated counterparts, spends a lot of time in what has become her signature pose: waking up on her side, naked and wet, hands placed demurely over her breasts. Another popular move, the (clothed) flying kick to the face (of a zombie and/or zombie dog), makes a return appearance, and to her repertoire she adds some fearsome knife-twirling. This is not a performance of emotions or hidden interiors, but of collectible action figures. But in a minimalist and sometimes near-robotic way, Jovovich owns the screen when she’s playing Alice; after three films, both the character and the actress just seem so damned resolute.

Extinction accommodates this unique star power by surrounding her with lightweights who make Jovovich’s wooden minimalism seem world weary and humane. Fehr has a couple of wry moments towards the end, but the buses carrying the convoy members might as well be labelled ‘corpses’ – they’re only interesting insofar as when and how quickly they die. The convoy subplot brings in human concerns the series had long since abandoned; after you become a jump-kicking, zombie-stabbing dynamo who may be developing telekinesis, apparently you can’t go home again.

Indeed, the human-heavy sections contain some of Anderson’s hoariest nonsense, augmented by a persistent thudding sound that turns out to be Ali Larter and Ashanti reading their lines (Larter somehow makes the possibility of survival in Alaska sound hilarious rather than, say, hopeful). A leaner, sparer version would sacrifice some of the goofiness and deliver on the promise of the darker impulses of the series. As it is, it’s a pretty silly B-picture.

Still, it’s a better, more entertaining B-picture than its predecessors. The scope expands, not just in its variety of production design, but in the movies it knocks off: other zombie pictures, Mad Max, The Birds, The Matrix, X-Men, and even Alien: Resurrection. But while Mulcahy and Anderson don’t synthesize them into something distinctive and new, they do smash and grab with panache.

And, as with every entry so far, Extinction primes the audience for a sequel; at this rate, maybe the series will continue to ‘actually good’. While it is hard to recommend a Resident Evil movie, it is even harder to say I wouldn’t see part four.

Jesse Hassenger