There’s obviously some guarantee of box office success in the husband-wife team of director Paul W.S. Anderson and actor Milla Jovovich that’s based on their long-running game adaptation series Resident Evil. Now that the series is reportedly finished, their dwindling star could get a recharge here with the adaptation of a not entirely different kind, namely that of a story by Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin. Similar to what she did in Resident Evil, Jovovich plays the kickass action lead, though in this case she’s a kind of rebel witch named Gray Alys who’s being sought by the religious authoritarians who rule this post-apocalyptic world. We first meet her as she’s ready to be hanged for apostasy, or what passes for apostasy in this place, as well as inciting the toiling masses to resist their overlords. She uses her hallucinatory powers to escape. One of Gray Alys’s peculiar personality traits—or maybe it’s some sort of innate quality of witches that Anderson fails to sufficiently explain—is that she can’t refuse a request for help, and so when a woman asks her to go to the Lost Lands to kill something called the Shapeshifter, she has to go. Along the way, she hooks up with a cowboy named Boyce (Dave Bautista) who uses twin-headed rattlesnakes as a weapon. As it turns out, Boyce, a lone wolf for hire, is snogging the queen, whose husband is old and decrepit and fixing to die without a male heir, so when the queen announces her miracle pregnancy all bets are off.

It says something about the story’s conception that every plot development feels arbitrary and made up on the spot. Anderson tries to mask this flaw with witty dialogue that immediately falls flat (“I never saw a man get emotional about a snake”), and he counts too much on the characters’ status as fantasy figures, which gives the actors little to work with. Jovovich is so stiff and monotonal that she sounds half asleep half the time. And it’s weird that Anderson and/or Martin doesn’t play up Gray Alys’s revolutionary bent until the last scene, when it comes across as an afterthought. It should have been central to the story in order to make it more compelling. Otherwise, it’s just the same random supernatural noise. 

Opens Jan. 1 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Kino Cinema Shinjuku )03-5315-0978), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

In the Lost Lands home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Constantin Film Produktion GmbH, Spark Productions AG