Life in the Resident Evil games is mediated through two screens. The obvious one is the inventory, which lets you pick between carryng around plot items (key cards etc), health stuff to keep you alive, and shiny weapons. The other, no less important, screen is the map. The stuff of life is finding keys to open doors far away, and figuring out that if I’ve gone up one flight of stairs, then if I can get through there and down those stairs, I’ll be .. eaten by zombies. Arse.
It’s for this reason that the Nemesis introduced in the third game works so well. It appears, you fight it till it drops, then run away. After a bit, you realise that this hall you’re running down does pass by the room you last saw him in, and then through the wall he comes.
Resident Evil:Apocalypse is a lot more faithful to The Map than the first film was: there’s a sense of spaces, and their division into safe and dangerous (to be made safe with guns). And, occasionally, cheap thrills via formerly safe places that are now dangerous. The Nemesis has the same effect on these divisions as in the original game: he smashes through everything to deliver some death. This only happens once for about five minutes – possibly the filmmakers realised that an excess of it would cause the similarities to The Terminator to become too apparent.
The rest of the time, the film does what it does: an unoriginal but impeccably constructed jigsaw of corporate conspiracy thriller, zombie movie and action flick. It also adds some comic relief with a little (goes a long way) of Mike Epps.