Following on from 2015 film Dead Rising: Watchtower, Dead
Rising: Endgame sees Jesse Metcalfe reprising his role as reporter Chase Carter, after getting a tip off that people are going abducted
and tested on under the guise of finding a cure for the zombie infection, Carter
discovers what he believes to be the source of the operation, along with fellow
reporter Jill and his hacker girlfriend Sandra, they soon find out that General
Lyons of the Federal Emergency Zombie Authority is actually in on what
appears to be a secret government conspiracy.
Chase is spotted and has to flee the area from Lyons’
men who are told to kill him, he manages to escape and get the footage to
his editor, on realising this the government set a contingency plan to silence
the reporter and his crew, until former Phenotrans pharmaceutical
corporation executive George Hancock meets Carter and informs him that the army
are hunting him down and they’re planning to kill the entire population through
a kill-switch within everyone’s preventative implants, Chase and gang decide to
meet the threat head on, diving back into the city of East Mission to shut down
the servers, and stop the cruel scientist Rand, played by Billy Zane, from
performing more experiments.
Now I've never seen Watchtower, but from what I've seen of
online criticism it wasn’t a great movie, but having never really played the
games either I was coming into this with a clean slate, from the outset all the
characters are re-introduced anyway and I had managed to get into the gist of
things pretty quickly, my problem was, the characters are all bland and devoid
of any real personality, this isn’t a dig at the actors, more so at the writing
and lack of decent characterisation, though it’s possible I’d have had a
greater knowledge and attachment to them had I seen the previous film.
To be honest if this movie is anything to go by then I’d
rather not, it has no massive standout points that really get you into it and
to be fair, I did end up having to watch it a second time owing to falling
asleep during my first watch, I mean I like B-movies, even the worst, Shark Exorcist,
Zombeavers, or the whole Sharknado series, but nothing really drew me into the
story, zombie outbreak, government conspiracy, it’s nothing that hasn’t been
done before, and better.
The kills on some of the zombies are admittedly quite good,
and the introduction of enhanced zombies ups the ante during the films second
half, but not enough to warrant sitting through a 90
minute movie for, I noticed a couple of references made to the games
themselves which were pretty good and I might’ve enjoyed them more if I’d really
played any, the scene where everyone is tooling up for the attack had me
thinking more of The A-Team than zombie action.
For all its flaws, the film does look good, with heaps of
atmosphere and well realised locations, the makeup and special effects are
surprisingly good too, plenty of very convincing zombies that wouldn’t look out
of place on The Walking Dead, all I can say is they probably used 75% of the
budget on the visuals, with the rest being shared out between the cast, crew
and writers, not that this is a bad thing, the production values are the main
thing that kept me watching.
Capcom don’t have a great history with video
game adaptions, lest we forget the absolute abomination that is Street Fighter
and the latter Resident Evil movies, are we ever going to get a truly great
video game movie? Possibly not, but in the meantime there is always the
mediocre ones such as Dead Rising: Endgame, worth a watch if you’re a fan of
the games, or zombies, or are just intrigued with what Billy Zane is doing with
his ‘career’ now.