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Reality Need Not Apply
The dawn of the new year is heralded by an incredible amount of gunfire, explosions, and arterial spray-- the DVD releases for the week of January 1st are almost entirely dedicated to big, loud action movies...
The third Resident Evil movie, Resident Evil: Extinction places the returning heroine, Alice, (Milla Jovovich: The Fifth Element, Ultraviolet) in the middle of a Road Warrior-style wasteland, a post-apocalyptic America overrun with zombies. Iain Glen (Tomb Raider, Darkness), a scientist working for the evil Umbrella Corporation, is hunting Alice, believing that her blood could domesticate the zombies, a la Day of the Dead, and instigates a clash between Alice's band of desert refugees and the Umbrella Corporation's new hyper-aggressive zombies. Originally based on a video game, Resident Evil: Extinction leans more towards a superhero style movie, outfitting Jovovich in an almost X-Men style costume and providing her with Dark Phoenix powers, and choreographing her fights with gravity defying leaps and flips as she single-handedly destroys armies.
Clive Owen (Sin City, Closer) sails through the air in the wire-fu/bullet ballet style of John Woo (Hard Boiled, The Killer) films in Shoot 'Em Up, which abandons reality even more thoroughly than Resident Evil: within the first five minutes, Owen kills a man with a carrot, delivers a baby while shooting hordes of bad guys, and cuts the cord with his gun. On the run and protecting the baby from Paul Giamatti (Sideways, American Splendor), Owen teams up with Monica Bellucci (The Matrix: Revolutions, The Brothers Grimm) and begins to investigate why his newfound infant is being hunted by a seemingly endless team of assassins.
Slightly more realistic than the others, War has Jason Statham (Snatch, The Transporter) tracking the enigmatic assassin who killed his partner. The assassin, known only as Rogue (Jet Li: Unleashed, Once Upon a Time in China), is embroiled in an escalating war between the Chinese Triads and the Japanese Yakuza, though no one is entirely certain which side he is on, or why. War is more focused on gunplay than most of Jet Li's films, but does feature his skills in a showcase swordfight scene, and allows him to duke it out with Statham for the first time since they co-starred in The One.
Jimmy & Judy is more along the lines of Bonnie & Clyde, sending Edward Furlong (Pecker, Terminator 2) and Rachael Bella (The Ring, American Gun) on a cross-country road trip as they flee suburbia in search of themselves. The pair document their journey with hand held video cameras, and their video diary documents their flourishing romance and escalating violent tendencies as they head toward their inevitable conclusion.
