It's a sad fact that most films based on video games tend to lose something in translation and end up being a bit of a mess. So why, then, is it that they keep coming? The simple answer is that they're guaranteed to make money, no matter how bad they are. Even the dire Doom movie has done pretty well both at the box office and on DVD. Which might defy logic, but the fact is that most game licences have a big enough fan base to guarantee the makers will at least get their money back. Even if you hired the Red Arrows to sky-write 'Doom is a load of old cobblers' around the world, people still would have gone to see it. Take Resident Evil, for example - the first movie was  halfway decent and was a big hit for the studio behind it. Then there was a sequel, which wasn't nearly as good, although it did feature the rather cool Nemesis as the movie's primary bad guy. It didn't do quite as well, but the studio still made a bit of cash. And now.. there's Resident Evil: Extinction. Oh dear.

Not only did this movie fail to match the success of either of its prequels, the film as is a colossal trainwreck. I was going to say that for some unknown reason, the film is set in a sandy post apocalyptic wasteland, but now I think about it, the reason for this is pretty clear. The film's setting enables the movie makers to film a bunch of scenes in a desert, thereby removing the need for expensive on location filming. The trouble with this is that it makes the film look very samey indeed. Equally anonymous are the film's characters - Milla Jovovich is once again cast as the ass-kicking Alice, but the rest are a fairly uninteresting bunch. Ali Larter and Oded Fehr in particular sleep walk their way through their roles, not that they're given much to do anyway.

Essentially, the movie is a series of boring and nonsensical setpieces. First the cast get attacked by birds, then zombies, then some more zombies, then there's a confrontation in a dark bunker, and then the film's over. There's precious few special effects, certainly compared to the previous films, and even if you enjoyed the previous films, there's no real reason watch this exercise in tedium. The good news is that there is apparently a CGI Resident Evil film, in the making, overseen by Capcom, the game's designers. And given that this new film will have no ties to the movie trilogy - which actually ends on something of a cliffhanger - there's hope yet. Resident Evil Extinction, on the other hand, isn't even worth renting. A truly dire movie.