'Resident Evil: Afterlife' is deadly dull

'Resident Evil: Afterlife" begins just past the finale of the third film in this video-game adaptation series, and ends with a cliffhanger. They're not even pretending 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 superstrong and everybody else the Living Dead.

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 "Arcadia" Alaska, where radio transmissions told them life could begin anew.

Alice narrates her quest into a camcorder as she flies over the Great White North. She finds only one survivor - Claire (Ali Larter).

And that sends them both to the smoky ruins of Los Angeles, where another tiny group is holding out against the viral hordes of flesh-eating undead.

Director Paul W.S. Anderson casts these survivors into a prison, where they hold out. Since it's L.A., he makes one an actor and one a producer. Then he shows us the last inmate there, and darned if it isn't Wentworth Miller from TV's "Prison Break." No doubt Anderson thought he looked at home behind bars.

Jovovich 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.

Anderson steals bullet-time effects from the "Matrix" movies, and the 3-D is mainly used to hurl shell-casings into the audience. In short, this fourth in the series is a humorless movie of morphing zombies (they take on beastly attributes), phoned-in performances and trite dialogue.