Living dread greets latest 'Resident Evil'

"Resident Evil: Afterlife" begins just past the finale of the previous film in the video-game adaptation series and ends with a cliffhanger. They're not even pretending to try to wrap up this tale of a post-zombie apocalypse world anymore. It'll go on until star Milla Jovovich puts her kids through college.

Alice (Jovovich) is still stalking the evil Umbrella Corp., the folks who created the virus that made her super-strong and everybody else the Living Dead. You'd think she'd have folded that Umbrella three movies ago, but no.

Albert Wesker, an executive who never takes off his sunglasses, is running the show. He's played by Shawn Roberts, who saw Val Kilmer in "Top Gun" a few too many times. Alice -- and a team of cloned Alices -- shoot up his latest headquarters in Tokyo in the film's opening moments. Then she sets out to find the refugees she packed off to Alaska, where radio transmissions told them life could begin anew.

She finds only one survivor -- Claire (Ali Larter). And that sends them both to the smoky ruins of Los Angeles, where another tiny group -- among them Boris Kodjoe, Kim Coates and Kacey Barnfield -- is holding out against the viral hordes of flesh-eating undead.

It's a humorless movie of morphing zombies (they take on beastly attributes), phoned-in performances and trite dialogue. "You can't help him," is all they can say when another of their number is picked off. "We have to move on."

Jovovich can still act, as she proves playing a femme fatale in the October drama "Stone." She used to give her all in these movies. Here, she still wears the leather jumpsuit with style. But she no longer runs as if her life depends on it.

That's a problem with the whole film. There's no urgency. Characters saunter through deadly situations as if they know there's a cliffhanger coming. No sense breaking a sweat.

And director Paul W.S. Anderson lets them. Even as legions of Umbrella minion-troopers are hurled into combat, Anderson stages and shoots their scramble like a walk-through at the first day of rehearsals. He steals bullet-time effects from the "Matrix" movies, and the 3-D is mainly used to hurl shell-casings into the audience.