Around two years ago, actress Milla Jovovich saw her popularity reach new heights in China thanks to Resident Evil: The Final Chapter.

As the sixth and final installment of the zombie game-adapted franchise, Resident Evil, which started in 2002, The Final Chapter earned nearly 1.2 billion yuan ($174.4 million) - the highest of all its films in China and far surpassing its box-office takings for North America.

Yet her most recent return to the world's second-largest film market has turned out to be something of a disappointment.

The Rookies, which marks the first Chinese film for Jovovich, has received low scores and a number of negative comments on major film review sites.

With a reported budget of more than 300 million yuan, the film grossed merely 21.8 million yuan as of Wednesday, according to box-office tracker Maoyan.

In earlier interviews with domestic reporters, Jovovich says she was a fan of Chinese martial arts films, including Zhang Yimou's Hero and Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Her love of the genre and respect for its director lead the Ukraine-born American actress to join the cast of the Chinese action production led by Alan Yuen, a filmmaker best known for penning the scripts for Monster Hunt 2 and New Police Story.

Also casting rising stars Darren Wang, Sandrine Pinna, Timmy Xu and Liu Meitong, the film is a kind of Chinese homage to such espionage classics like the James Bond and Mission: Impossible franchises, but presented with a more high-spirited tone.

Set mainly in China and Hungary, Wang stars as a fictional extreme sports enthusiast who is accidentally drawn into the international criminal trade of chemical and biological weapons.

After being recruited by Jovovich's super agent, who works for an independent secret spy organization which was founded in the 18th century, the young rookie embarks on an adventure after teaming up with a bumbling police officer, a self-made scientist and an unemployed doctor.

On its opening day on Friday, the film was shown on around 18 percent of the country's screens, in a sign that suggested domestic theater operators believed it would sell well.

But the film soon drew a lot of criticism and its share of screen numbers sank to 9 percent by Saturday. Usually, a blockbuster's screen time can be maintained through its opening week. With a series of fast-paced stunt-driven sequences, from a death-defying jump onto a helicopter in midair, to car chases around the narrow streets of Budapest, the film was criticized for a storyline that suffers from a number of plot holes.

"The film runs for 113 minutes, but doesn't develop any of its characters convincingly and lacks a necessary explanation for the motives of the main villain. It also doesn't make sense that four rookies suddenly become so formidable without any training in the latter half of the movie," says one netizen on Mtime, a popular movie news and reviews site.

For the Chinese fans who expected to see Jovovich perform stunts as dazzling as her role of zombie killer Alice in the Resident Evil franchise, many were left feeling disappointed after the female protagonist was paralyzed by a bullet a third of the way into the movie. For the remainder of the film, up until the closing scenes, where Jovovich was finally cured by acupuncture, the character could do little more than blink her eyes as the story began to unfold.

"Stars and action scenes are no longer a guarantee of ticket revenues. The ending of The Rookies was a flop, and again shows that Chinese audiences are more discerning about storylines and characters. It will compel domestic filmmakers to concentrate more on polishing scripts before they start shooting," says Wang Xiaoyang, a Beijing-based critic.