Resident Evil: Retribution

So we went and saw Resident Evil: Retribution this past weekend.  As a longtime fan of the movies and the games, we were incredibly excited.  Zombie movies are probably our favorite kind of movie.  And then there was Retribution...

The first Resident Evil movie was good.  The introduction of the new character of Alice really helped the movie.  The zombies were great, the environment (The Hive) was great.  It felt new.  The second Resident Evil movie (Apocalypse) was a misstep.  We see S.T.A.R.S. in action and we get introduced to sexy cop Jill Valentine.  Aside from that, it was a completely forgettable movie with an epic boss battle with Nemesis that completely misses the mark.  Resident Evil: Extinction was amazing.  The post-apocalyptic setting (especially the destroyed Vegas) was fantastic.  Alice was struggling with her new powers and she was armed with dual kukris, which made her a legitimate bad ass.  The zombies were still the main enemies and proved to be excellent fodder for our team of traveling survivors.  Resident Evil: Afterlife stepped it up a notch with the 3D effects.  It was a little more over the top but still made for quite an entertaining movie.  Less emphasis seemed to be placed on the zombies in lieu of the giant axe wielding man (the Executioner lifted from the video game Resident Evil 5).

And that brings us to Resident Evil: Retribution.  We finally get to find out what happened on the freighter at the end of the last movie!  We finally get to see Leon Kennedy and Barry Burton in the movies!  Unfortunately, what followed was the worst movie I've seen all year.  There are SPOILERS ahead but, honestly, I would not recommend that anybody go see this travesty.

Where to start... the plot is beyond convoluted.  The narrative is spotty at best and makes no sense for the first half of the movie.  They eventually offer explanations that at such a late stage feel like a consolation prize.  The dialogue... my god, the dialogue.  I don't know what happened to Paul W. S. Anderson between movies considering he has written all of the movies but he dropped the ball on this one.  After watching Alice and Ada Wong walk through what is very clearly a holographic wall, he feels it necessary to give Ada Wong a line explaining that it is a holographic wall.  As if the audience would not have been able to understand that.  Most of the dialogue comes off as stilted, over-explanatory drudge that is blatantly intended as exposition.

It feels like this film was intended on being one giant appeasement for video game fanboys (and it even fails at that).  Oh, the fans of the game want to see Ada Wong, Barry Burton and Leon Kennedy?  Let's shoehorn them into our story!  Fanboys loved past characters from the franchise?  Let's pull in a handful of people from the previous films!  But wait, didn't most of these people die in those movies?  Doesn't matter!  Let's just use clones, those are always convenient plot devices.

Leon's movie debut is terrible.  He's too rugged and manly - in the games, Leon is much more of a pretty boy who can kick ass  The guy who plays Leon would have made a great Chris Redfield instead of the actor they chose for Afterlife, who had no charisma whatsoever.  Ada Wong's introduction in the movie is lifted straight from a scene in Resident Evil 4 where she sneaks up on Leon and he ends up with a knife to her throat.  It was a great little reference and the casting and costuming of Ada Wong was pitch perfect.  Sadly, her wooden acting and neutered dialogue killed what could have been as intriguing a character as she was in the games.  Barry Burton, who is played by Kevin Durand, is one of the few characters to be pulled off successfully.  He's a little bit cheesy but it captures the essence of Barry pretty damn well.

They even brought in the "Las Plagas" parasite from Resident Evil 4.  I was excited about this.  Resident Evil 4 is still one of the creepiest games ever and the seemingly unstoppable Las Plagas were great enemies, even if they weren't quite zombies.  Instead, what we get in Retribution are Russian Zombies.  I don't know how they are "Las Plagas Undead", as the movie informs us, considering they just look like Russian versions of the zombies from the classic movie, Dead Snow.  There is nothing Plagas about them.  Their heads don't pop off to reveal terrifying parasites.  Nope, they are just regular looking zombies dressed in Russian military outfits and armed with weapons.  We even get a random zombie with a chainsaw (just like in the game, OMG!), despite the fact that a Russian soldier wielding a chainsaw in Red Square doesn't even remotely make sense.  They even bring the Las Plagas parasite back into the movie at the climax, where one of the characters gets the parasite injected into her.  Does she show signs of parasitic infection?  No.  Does she look different at all?  No.  Apparently all it does is give her the ability to heal and makes her strong enough to crack sternums with a single punch.

The movie feels completely disingenuous.  It too often breaks from the flow to go into some CGI screen from the Red Queen's perspective.  The same Red Queen who has somehow now booted series villain Albert Wesker from his spot at the head of Umbrella and is now trying to bring about the downfall of the world.  It feels like a video game with all of these scenes and yet it lacks the spark of ANY of the video games.  There's even a scene towards the end where two people are beating the shit out of each other.  It comes off as very visceral and brutal, which was perfect.  And then, right in the middle of the scene as one character is about to break the other's arm, we cut to a CGI x-ray looking screen showing the bone breaking in the arm.  Because people wouldn't have figured it out if you had just put in the bone crunching sound?  Or if you had shown the bone poking through the skin?  Or just about any other way of showing such a thing rather than breaking from the intense action to show a completely out-of-place video game-esque screen really ensuring that we know this guy's arm is broken.

It goes on and on.  Did we need a five minute scene of Alice fighting and killing the same set of zombies over and over again?  No, probably not.  Did we need yet ANOTHER scene of the god damn laser corridor coming to chop somebody into pieces?  Fucking hell no.  Considering this is now the third movie (out of five) to show the laser hallway, I'm over it.  Was it fresh and impressive the first time?  Absolutely.  But again and again and again?  Not so much.  Same goes for the ridiculous elements that were intended to be 3D.  In Afterlife, they showed the edge of the axeman's axe swinging at you.  In this movie, the exact same thing.

So how do you make the movie seem fresh?  How about inventing some magical plot about Umbrella creating environments based on Suburbia, Moscow, New York and Tokyo?  That'll make for some great scenery!  Even if you buy into it, the logic that they created doesn't follow through.  Movies in general require a suspension of disbelief, but this one just never earns it.  One example is at the very end, where they are trapped at the bottom of an elevator shaft because the Red Queen cut the power.  And then the explosives go off and everything starts flooding, but aren't they going to drown!?  No wait, the elevator suddenly works in the nick of time with absolutely zero explanation.  Thank goodness!

The same lack of logic pervades Retribution.  The Red Queen wants Alice and Ada dead REALLY BADLY because Alice is a threat.  So when they get to the New York simulation, what does the Red Queen do?  She releases two Executioners and that's it.  She can run full scale zombie epidemic simulations, infecting all of the clone test subjects with the zombie virus and she releases TWO Bio-Organic Weapons.  Again, that's it.  She needs to destroy Alice and all she does is send Jill Valentine (who is being controlled by a device on her chest that literally gets gently brushed off by the end and that curiously causes her hair to turn blonde) and a group of Umbrella soldiers (whose thick body armor inexplicably gets pierced by every single bullet) and two big, lumbering axemen.  No zombie hordes.  Nothing else.

Alice, the bad ass woman who has been decimating zombies for five movies now, has been through hell and back.  She gets shot in this movie and bleeds out for most of the movie (which is completely irrelevant to anything else) and it barely slows her down.  Hell, she even survives having her sternum completely cracked and having her heart stop for a couple of seconds.  And yet, she discovers the clone daughter of clone Suburbia Alice and suddenly she's Suzy Homewife.  No longer liberated, she spends the rest of the movie trying to protect the daughter that isn't really hers.  It's an absurdity that feels like a cheap plot point to make Alice seem vulnerable, even though she already is more vulnerable without her powers.

Another point of lazy screenwriting - it would have been horribly inconvenient for Alice to have her powers in this movie (because everything would have been way too easy) so we had Wesker conveniently remove her powers at the end of Afterlife only to have him restore them at the end of this one.  It's just so damn predictable.

The score was a ridiculous blend of dub step and noise.  There was no tension whatsoever.

Which also comes down to one thing... where the hell were the zombies?  The Las Plagas Undead in Moscow were a joke and behaved more like ugly humans than zombies.  The Bio-Organic Weapons (the axemen) were scary looking but nothing like typical zombies.  The Tokyo zombies suffered from the fact that they apparently could take infinite amounts of damage and keep getting up, which made Alice's extended battle with them seem incredibly pointless.  That leaves us with the Suburbia zombies, which happened to be the best part of the entire movie.

After Alice is knocked unconscious and we are taken to a completely unrelated narrative, we see Alice and Carlos living happily in Suburbia with an unnecessarily deaf daughter (seriously, what did this character trait contribute to the movie at all?).  They go about their normal morning routine and then shit hits the fan.  It is very reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead and carries a great amount of tension and dramatic weight.  Unfortunately, this sequence lasts only a few minutes and is completely waved away by the fact that they are all clones.

Like Afterlife before it, Retribution's ending is one giant cliff-hanger, serving as an instant segue into the next film.  Regrettably, this is one conclusion that I am no longer looking forward to.

Hey, at least Resident Evil 6 comes out in 14 days.


TL;DR: Resident Evil: Retribution sucked.