Director Paul W.S. Anderson has got to admit that he is an addict. And like any addiction, the desperation worsens, irrationality sets in, and the personal trauma unfolds for all those forced to witness. Evidently, he is addicted to making more and more Resident Evil films no matter how bad they get; observers can only stand by and watch in horror as Retribution unfolds on screen into a calamitous, painful mess that will leave few unhurt in its wake.
Premise: Alice teams with the resistance against the Umbrella Corporation and zombies. Result: This movie was about something, or so they tell us, but it is not clear what really. But who cares.
On some level, Anderson should be commended. After all, Afterlife, his fourth film in the series, had, if nothing else, proven to be one of the more messy, boring, preposterous action-horror films to date. And yet somehow, Retribution is much worse. After an interesting, promising opening sequence beautifully played backwards, there was the hope that this film would rebound the franchise from the rim of that precarious drain.
Of course, in an act of cruelty perhaps, Anderson shows us a glimpse of intriguing art, and then promptly replaces it with a smolder bag of dog sh$t. First, there is happy Alice (Milla Jovovich), sleeping in bed, awakened by her loving husband (Oded Fehr) beginning a long line of unnecessary cameos. She is also a mom to hearing-impaired Becky (Aryana Engineer). But expectedly, zombies attack and everything goes to hell. It is literally “déjà vu all over again.”
Next, we are plunged into darkness only to find Alice in an interrogation cell, mostly naked but for a scanty cloth that appears to serve no purpose other than to barely keep an R-rating. She is interrogated by brainwashed Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) -who popped out suddenly at the end of the last film- and then promptly tortured when she fails to respond to the question, “Who are you working for?” Why Jill is asking this question defies all logic: Umbrella knows Alice, they know her motives – there have been too many movies for them not to know. Alice seems confused too since she can’t even coinsure a response.
But then, inexplicably, all systems are shut down temporarily and she escapes. She is plunged into a Tokyo sequence and manages to fight off dozens of zombies that seem to come out of the walls. We have seen this, too, of course. Then she finds herself in the Umbrella control room where all employees are dead but bumps into former Umbrella agent Ada Wong (Bingbing Li), appropriately dressed to kick butt and walk the cat walk.
Then comes the bombshell: she is working with Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), who suddenly needs her. To be fair, it is unclear how long Alice was unconscious; however, this twist is too nonsensical to accept. Wesker, who is a mutated horror that was the arch-enemy in the last film is now suddenly on Alice’s side? And why? Oh, because The Red Queen, the foe then friend then foe has suddenly decided to eradicate all life on Earth. How convenient.
The rest of the film is yet another permutation of the “escape” narrative that seems the only plotline Anderson can manage. Here, a team including Luther West (Boris Kodjoe), Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb), and Barry Burton (Kevin Durand) among others, storm the Red Queen’s fortress off the coast of Kampuchea and establish a timeline of two hours for the rescue. What ensues if a Resident Evil Anniversary special, welcoming back all the familiar friends and villains of the past including Rain (Michelle Rodriguez), Carlos, more zombies, The giant Axe Men, more Red Queen, the horrible mutated creatures that look like giant burnt dogs, and the reintroduction of Las Plagas.
There are a few mildly entertaining fight sequences but ultimately this film is a poorly strung together version of all the previous films. At best, the film is a somber series of dull, repetitive action sequences, poor decisions and cheap thrills that feel stale and unoriginal; at worst, this film is a money-laundering scheme by Anderson that barely looks like a movie at all, rather, instead a grafted version of edited scenes from previous film with no interest in continuity or reason.
The acting as a whole is awful. Jovovich is passable but again suffers from the obscene dialogue; Bingbing is just her Asian doppelganger, uttering lines with equal discomfort and giving sense that she belongs somewhere, anywhere else. Rodriguez has to play multiple characters, and seems ill satisfied with any of them. But she is still a badass. The men, as an essentialized class of combatants are passable, but won’t live long in memories.
Ultimately, this film does nothing in the way of making sense or instilling any intrigue or satisfaction. It is boring throughout and seems like it was scribbled on a cocktail napkin that was used to film the movie directly without a thought to what the end result might be. Oh what a long way we have fallen from the original film: frankly, Ed Wood may have made a better movie with a similar budget and technology.
Rating: 2 – Boxed wine and Razorblades – let’s see which kills you faster!
Director Paul W.S. Anderson (Event Horizon, Resident Evil) finally gets a distraction from what has become a Resident Evil franchise catastrophe. Despite all the actual devastation on screen, the film is fairly fun action fluff with a requisite disaster porn finale that, well, I guess we all saw coming.
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