Resident Evil: Retribution

So my pal and I went and saw Resident Evil: Some Ominous Word last week. Actually, I read something interesting about the titles of these movies. There ain’t no number in them. There’s Saw 4, Saw 5, Saw 6, Saw 27, etc., but Resident Evil movies have no roman numeral (or any sort of number) after them. Kinda makes them cool, I think; sets them apart.


Anyway …

It was okay.

My initial observation was that there was too much damn shooting. “What do you expect in a Resident Evil movie?” my friend asked incredulously. Though he plays the first-person shooter Resident Evil games on his Wii.

What was I expecting?

I dunno. More horror, I guess. More monsters, more suspense, more Alien-ish-type tension. But then it wouldn’t be a Resident Evil flick.

Perhaps now’s the time for Full Disclosure: I never played the video game the movie’s based on (does ten drunken minutes last New Year’s Eve count?). And I don’t watch the movies with an eye for in-depth cinematic and thematic analysis.

No, I watch them for Milla Jovovich.

Now, I’m kinda embarrassed to admit this, but I have a school-boy crush on her. Is it mid-life crisis? you ask. No. I first noticed her fifteen years ago in The Fifth Element and was smitten ever since.

I reviewed the previous movie, here. For those keeping score at home, I think Milla looks a lot better in this one.

Okay. Now let’s pretend I’m a mid-forty-year-old wanna-be film critic, not a fourteen-year-old boy.

The story is quite convoluted though it kinda makes sense by the final scene. If you sit back and decide to let the logical part of your brain sip an ice tea in a hammock, you’ll enjoy the movie. That’s what I decided about five minutes in. So, in one sentence, the ninety-minute flick is about … a captured Alice being recruited by an outside force to break out of evil Umbrella Corp’s underwater Arctic facility to help said outside force – who’s an enemy turned ally or is it? – save the world from the Evil that Umbrella Hath Wrought.

How’s that?

There was plenty I liked. The opening scene is played completely in reverse for the first couple of minutes as the credits flash by. That fascinated me, drew me in. And I liked the underwater facility, complete with pre-Star Trek holodeck versions of Times Square, Moscow, Berlin, “Suburbia.” A couple of monsters from the previous movie make cameos, and there’s a giant toothy slimy thing that pops outta nowhere several times to claim unsuspecting victims. Alice does a full-out Ripley in her attachment to a deaf child. And the ending, the ultimate scene, was one of those camera-pull-back sequences where you see How Bad it really is and wonder, “How the hell will mankind survive?”

There was also plenty bad, too. The aforementioned endless shooting. I think 20,000 rounds of ammunition were fired, fairly consistently, throughout the film, an average of 222 rounds per minute of screen time. And I like my zombies ambling at moderate speeds, not tooling around on dirt bikes or manning anti-aircraft guns on the backs of jeeps. The members of the team sent in to rendezvous with escapee Alice all look as if they just walked off a Karl Lagerfeld runway. Too much kung-fu that would kill a normal human being. I mean, can a hundred-pound woman really kick you forty feet airborne across a sheet of ice? And can you still do jujitsu and stuff with broken ribs and, well, what seems to be a ruptured aorta?

I’m imagining a sort of see-saw scale, with one dish labeled “Crap That Took Me Outta the Movie” and the other “Awesomeness That Made Me Forget My Life Outside This Movie Theater.” I take the two preceding paragraphs, chop up all the main points and supporting details in each and pour them into the appropriate dishes. Then I remove my hands. And the verdict is …

Resident Evil: Retribution tilts noticeably but not definitively towards the Cool End of the Scale.

Grade: Solid-B.