Resident Evil: Retribution

The Resident Evil film franchise, now ten years old and on its fifth movie, is pretty much only speaking to its rabid fan base by now. Don't be fooled by the fact that the film opens with a three minute recap of the entire story up until now by the series heroine Alice (once again played by Milla Jovovich). Anyone who walks into this movie without previous knowledge will likely be lost. As someone who hasn't much enjoyed the earlier movies, it is no surprise that Retribution did not do a lot for me, either. But, in fairness, I will say it's not as bad as some of the other ones. Yes, it's just as dumb and nonsensical, but it moves by too fast for you to care that much.

The film picks up where the last one ended, with a massive battle aboard a sea craft between Alice and the insidious Umbrella Corporation, who has been behind all the zombies, mutants, and God-only-knows-whats she's been fighting for five movies now. Actually, we get to see this sequence twice - Once in reverse during the opening credit sequence, and then again after the previously mentioned recap of the plot so far provided by Alice. The action then suddenly switches to Alice as a suburban housewife, living with a handsome husband (Oded Fehr) and a cute little hearing-impaired daughter (Aryana Engineer). Naturally, domestic bliss is not in the cards for our heroine, as some zombies suddenly burst into the house, and start attacking her family. Alice manages to escape with her daughter, only to find that the entire neighborhood has been turned into a zombie apocalypse.

Obviously, none of this is real, and Alice awakens within the deep chambers of the Umbrella Corporation, where she is being tortured by her former friend-turned mindless killer Jill Valentine (Sienna Guilloy), who is now under mind control. Alice manages to escape when someone or something manages to disable the Corporation's hi-tech security for a couple minutes. They even supply her with a skin tight black outfit, which guarantees that Jovovich will be fulfilling the fantasies of many young men in the audience for the rest of the film. Now equipped with her suit and automatic guns, Alice has to escape from the compound. Surprisingly, in order to survive, she will have to rely on her arch nemesis, Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), who strikes an uneasy temporary truce with Alice, since he realizes he needs her help this time. He even supplies her with one of his operatives to help her out, a woman named Ada Wong (Bingbing Li), who dresses like she is going out for a fancy dinner party, rather than for surviving a zombie apocalypse. Regardless, Ada is handy with a gun, and helps Alice blast through the various monsters they will encounter for the next 90 minutes.

Once Alice and Ada are off and running and gunning, the movie pretty much turns into an extended feature-length action sequence that does not end until the closing credits show up. The two make their way through the underground Umbrella complex, fighting their way through a variety of simulations of major cities like New York, Tokyo, Moscow, and the suburbs where Alice found herself living in as a housewife at the beginning. Why does Umbrella have all these simulations? Well, the script says they're so the evil corporation could test the effectiveness of their bio-weapons in a controlled environment, but I say it's so returning writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson can give us some semi-interesting set pieces, other than just the sterile and brightly lit hallways of the Umbrella building. It's a neat idea, but we see so little of these major city simulations, they don't get to leave an impact on us. In the New York sim, for example, we could have had Alice battling some mutants in the Empire State Building or something. Instead, all we get is a very short battle with some massive monsters who carry giant hammers on the streets.

Resident Evil: Retribution is a particularly mindless entry of an already mindless film franchise, as it's essentially non-stop noise, gunfire, and gory special effects, broken up by I think about six or seven minutes of exposition dialogue early on. After that, the rest of the dialogue pretty much consists of Alice and her survivor friends saying things like "over here", or "look out". Anderson's screenplay does throw the heroes a couple comedic one-liners, and there's a brief attempt to create some kind of emotion, with Alice bonding with the little girl from the beginning. But let's not kid ourselves. The movie is essentially a 100 minute long special effects and make up demo. At that, it can be effective from time to time. There are some good action sequences tossed in. But, the non-stop shooting and carnage just exhausted me eventually, and I was ready for it to be over long before the movie actually was ready to end.

But then, this movie was obviously not made for me. The fans who turn out in droves to see these movies every couple years will likely get what they want, and I'm sure we'll be seeing the sixth Resident Evil movie that the ending sets up very soon. I can wait, personally, but if you're a fan, at least you now have something to look forward to.

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