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Perhaps the funniest moment in Resident Evil: Extinction appears in the extras, where Paul W.S. Anderson, a true god among hacks, claims that he single-handedly reinvented the zombie film . “No one made a zombie film for fifteen years before Resident Evil,” he boasts, a claim which even a cursory glance at any list of zombie films will quickly debunk. Bold pioneer that he is Anderson claims goes on to brag about his daring choice to shoot a zombie in the daylight… ground well-tread not only in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead twenty-nine years previous, but also in the 2004 Zack Snyder remake. Yeah, Paul. You’re a real ground-breaker.

For such a purportedly brave adventure into uncharted cinematic territory, Extinction offers much that will be readily familiar to both zombie buffs and fans of the previous Resident Evil films. Taking heavy cues from The Road Warrior (or at least Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome), Extinction takes place several years after the equally preposterous (but far funnier) Resident Evil: Apocalypse. To make a long story short: zombies have taken over the world, as the evil Umbrella Corporation’s runaway T-Virus wipes out “plants, lakes and oceans,” leaving only a handful of meager survivors. Said survivors, as they must in movies like these, now trek across the country in convoys of giant semi trucks and all-terrain vehicles, shooting zombies with high-powered weapons and smoking lots of cigarettes… basically, a thirteen-year-old boy’s dream come true.

Blazing across the desert on her badass motorcycle comes Alice (Milla Jovovich, sporting one of the worst movie haircuts in recent memory), now a psychokinetic wunderkind who can leap thirty feet into the air, blow up orbiting satellites with her mind, and dispatch zombies with her double kukri knives in thigh-high stockings and a low-cut top. (Basically, another thirteen-year-old boy’s dream come true.) Alice teams up with battle-hardened survivalists Claire Redfield (Ali Larter) and Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr), and the convoy then meanders from one overblown action sequence to another as the characters make vague noises about heading up to “Alaska” while being menaced by legions of hyperactive, sprinting undead. There is a group of hapless extras (including a black guy whose tag line is “Aw, hell naw!”), but they’re all violently killed long before you can be bothered to learn their names.

Extinction is directed by Russell Mulcahy, whom genre fans will recognize as being the genius behind Highlander II. In all fairness, Mulcahy knows how to shoot an action sequence, and Extinction is a decent-looking film, full of gritty sepia tones and the kind of hot, overexposed look that’s been increasingly de rigeur since Pitch Black. Because it’s penned by Paul W.S. Anderson, of course, Extinction‘s ridiculous story plays much like the cheesy post-apocalyptic B-movies of the Eighties, and will probably hold a lot of appeal (as Anderson himself admits) to teenaged kids who have never seen it done better in The Road Warrior. The film’s only inventive moment comes in the first act, as the convoy is attacked by a crazed horde of infected birds (the idea for which, Anderson will probably claim, Hitchcock totally ripped off from him.) The rest is so predictable that you could easily make a drinking game out of it — which character will get bitten and turn into a zombie at an extremely inconvenient moment? Which character will get bitten and heroically sacrifice him (or her) self to save the others? Does the black guy die first? Does he wryly comment on it? You get the idea.

Extinction is not entirely without ambition, however. The greater plot (such as it is) rears its ugly head in the final act, as the predictably psychotic Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen) devises a plan to bring Alice into Umbrella’s underground Hive for his outlandish and wildly improbable genetic experiments. In between the zombie attacks, Isaacs delivers foreboding, cliched speeches to an anonymous Umbrella Corporation board of directors, who wear sunglasses indoors and mutter dark imprecations about “liquidation” and “deadlines” straight out of the corporate-bad-guy playbook. (It’s worth mentioning that Extinction teaches many valuable lessons about what life on post-apocalyptic Earth will be like; for example, despite there being very few survivors left on the planet, there is apparently such an abundance of high-level genetic scientists still lurking around that the villains can still afford to kill them in droves just to prove a dramatic point.) Eventually, of course, the Umbrella Corporation lures Alice into the Hive, where the requisite “boss fight” ensues, followed by the setup for the inevitable sequel.

Fans have apparently complained that this third installment in the Resident Evil series departs too dramatically from the video games; this seems a tad uncharitable, given that not only does Extinction revisit several elements from the other two movies (the Hive, the fake house, the spooky little-girl A.I.), but repeats the central gag of the first film on two separate occasions. (Hint: it’s the corridor with a sense of humor.)

Overall, Extinction provides the same improbable scenarios, over-the-top fan service, and gratuitous violence that characterized the previous installments, with a bit more gore and a whole lot more zombies. If anything, it’s significantly less goofy than Apocalypse, as certain tropes become a lot easier to swallow once you enter post-apocalyptic territory. Extinction isn’t good by any objective measure — but it is loud, stupid, and more fun than it has any real right to be.

Final Grade: C-