Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016) Review

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016) Review

 

Happy Halloween!

I saw the final Resident Evil film with three friends when it first came out. One of them had seen the fifth entry (and some of the previous movies), and two of them had never seen any of the other movies before. You could say I was the “resident” expert on the series. That didn’t matter in the end, because all of us were equally baffled by The Final Chapter. It was a unique and hilarious movie-going experience, filled with laughter and chatter, and I knew I could never re-watch this movie in the same way ever again. I watched it for the first time since the theater prior to writing this review, and I was not surprised to find it was an inferior experience, but I was surprised by how many specific details I forgot about that contributed to making it one of the funniest movies I had seen in years. 

There’s no bullshit to start us off this time, we get right into the anticipated Alice recap, and it’s so fast-paced with so much info delivered at once that it’s overwhelming. She talks about a doctor who I guess started the Umbrella Corporation and invented the T-Virus to save his dying daughter, and the first zombie incident wasn’t actually in The Hive in the original movie, it was on a gondola overseas, but it was covered up. Dr. Isaacs was this guy’s partner and Albert Wesker worked for them, but then Isaacs had Wesker kill him and Isaacs became his daughter’s caregiver and created the Red Queen A.I. to look like her. This entire recap/intro feels like a retcon. It’s almost as if, oh, I don’t know, Paul W.S. Anderson didn’t have this six-movie story planned out from the beginning? I thought the Red Queen was based on that wheelchair-bound scientist’s daughter from Apocalypse? And why are we only hearing about this inventor of the T-Virus now? And where was Wesker in the first two movies if he was so important? Many questions have been raised, and we will get some answers, just not the ones you might expect.

The battle at the White House teased at the end of Retribution is skipped over. We see the aftermath; the White House is in ruins, along with the rest of Washington, but Alice managed to survive as usual. There’s actually a decent jump scare with a fat gross aquatic zombie, but the bar is so low at this point that it feels like I just made a significant positive comment by saying there was a “decent” jump scare. A giant flying monster comes out of the rubble and attacks her, so she flees in a jeep. I don’t know how this monster came to exist or if it's something from the games, but I'm all for it. This is the kind of fun schlock action I love, but the camera work is extremely shaky and the editing is off the wall. The footage is so chopped up you’d think the editor was a chef in a Michelin three-star restaurant dicing an onion. Better get used to that, because it’s a constant throughout the entire movie.

Alice wanders into a dark building and hears what sounds like an early 90’s printer. Turns out, yeah, that's what it is, and the Red Queen is using it to communicate with her, but then the Red Queen immediately uses a bunch of screens to talk to Alice instead, so I guess the printer was just to entice her? Alice admits the Red Queen wiped out humanity and won, but that’s not quite true. Apparently, there’s an airborne antivirus that can wipe out the T-Virus and save the world, and they talk about it as if there’s anything to salvage. The world has been in ruins for three whole movies! 99% of humanity has been turned into zombies! The Red Queen lures Alice with the prospect of revenge: Wesker tricked her with the whole White House fiasco, and he didn’t give back her powers. He’s in The Hive in Raccoon City, along with the antivirus, so she goes there to kill him once and for all and save the world. Why is the Red Queen helping Alice now? Why does Alice believe this evil A.I. and doesn’t think it might be trying to trick her again? I have no answers because the movie doesn’t either.

On the way to Raccoon City Alice fights some Umbrella soldiers and gets captured, and she meets Dr. Isaacs again, but didn’t he get turned into a monster and killed in the laser hallway at the end of the third movie? Is this guy a clone? Nope, turns out she killed his clone previously, this one is the original. This should seem dumber than it does, but for this series it’s more like an ambivalent detail, and I like the actor who plays Isaacs so I'm not mad he’s back. The transport they're on is full of weird religious survivors, and Isaacs is one of them now. He makes Alice walk behind them on the road with a cable attached to her as a massive horde of zombies follows them, but she gets out of it and gets the upper hand—literally. She fights Isaacs and chops his hand off, then gets away on a motorbike to Raccoon City. There’s little left of the metropolis—probably because they detonated a nuclear bomb there at the end of the second movie, don’t forget.

She comes across a group of survivors which includes Claire Redfield. Claire catches Alice up real quick and Alice tells Claire about her mission. Their conversation is hilarious. First of all, Claire’s explanation for what happened to her since the end of the fourth movie/beginning of the fifth movie is all of five seconds long. What happened to her brother? No idea. Then, Alice comes off like a total idiot for believing the Red Queen AGAIN after the A.I. has tried to kill her multiple times in the past, but then in the end Claire agrees to help her anyway, making her also seem like an idiot. Isaacs shows up on the transport, along with the zombie horde that followed, so Alice and company shoot the zombies, and it is as perfunctory as these scenes can get. They somehow collect enough gasoline to light the biggest fire ever seen in one of these movies and burn up a ton of the zombies. Remember when they couldn't find fuel in the third movie? Oops, I forgot, I’m not supposed to think about what makes sense, just enjoy the mayhem and carnage.

The little team descends into The Hive. Alice reflects that her whole life feels like running and killing, which is an amazing little moment of self-awareness. A pack of new zombie dogs attacks the group—or, are they hyenas? They seem bigger than any previous ones, but they don’t stick around long. The Red Queen all of a sudden starts telling the group about the Umbrella Corporation’s back story. It’s abrupt and jarring, especially because it comes off as super heavy-handed commentary on our real world. In the flashback, Isaacs suggests to Umbrella board members an orchestrated apocalypse to cleanse the earth. It’s so dumb that it’s hilarious. We went from unintended zombie outbreak in the first/second movie to a ham-fisted twist that it was all part of a secret plan all along. The Red Queen says it can’t stop Isaacs, but the team can, and it tells Alice an informant is among the group, but we don’t know who it is. It feels like a forced recall to the first movie to add a new mystery—and everyone in this group feels like a non-character, by the way, so it’s doubly stupid.  

The team almost gets sucked into a giant turbine and it's more over-dramatic than a sixteen-year-old getting broken up with at senior prom, then they get split up against their will and Alice has to fight a new toothy freak beast. It’s a cool monster, but the action is shot mostly in the dark with some strobing lights and the same frantic shakiness and choppy editing as the rest of the movie. We discover a whole bunch of rich people are cryogenically frozen in the facility basement, waiting until everything is back to normal to repopulate earth. It is insane how dumb this series continues to get. But it gets better: the real, REAL Isaacs comes out of cryo and meets with Alice. Yes, the religious Isaacs from earlier who said he was the real one is also a clone! So many clones!

Alice gets betrayed by the informant, then runs through some scenarios in her head of how to kill Isaacs, but he tells her not to bother, because he’s been upgraded with technology, and we see her lose in all the same scenarios. It’s actually kind of a cool series of shots. Isaacs explains every clone thinks they’re the real one (except all the Alice clones from Extinction/Afterlife, I guess, and the other clones from Retribution), and this leads to the scariest reveal in the whole series. The Alice we’ve been following for six whole movies? She is a clone, too! Enter: OLD ALICE! Milla Jovovich comes out as a wheel chair-bound elderly version of the daughter Isaacs adopted, with old age makeup and everything. My adolescent memories of hot Milla were completely crushed by this inconceivable revelation.  

How mind-blowing is this? According to this movie, The Red Queen was based on childhood Alice, main Alice is a clone (meaning those other clones in Afterlife were clones of a clone) and old Alice is there, and they’re all in the same room! Old Alice fires Wesker as if she’s Donald Trump on The Apprentice, and suddenly Wesker is vulnerable because he’s not under the protection of the Red Queen/Umbrella, and he gets his foot chopped off by a closing door. Not long after, old Alice declares he’s dying, suddenly. How could that be what does him in after having survived a plane crash, being stabbed in the head, shot in the face, and blown up? “Just get on with it,” old Alice tells him. Amazing.   

Red Queen tells Isaacs “You’re all going to die down here.” They just couldn't resist slipping in that already-repeated line one more time, could they? Alice and Claire fight Isaacs on a rising platform, and there were so many rapid edits in the fight scene I thought I might have a stroke. It comes down to just Alice and Isaacs, and Alice finds herself in the laser hallway again. At least they had the sense to bring back that fan-favourite feature. Alice dodging the lasers in the hallway while Isaacs watches somehow feels like the most-video-game-esque-moment yet. He lays a smack down on her and holds her hand up to the laser, cutting her fingers off, then declares their game is over. Alice sneaks a grenade into his pocket and he’s fatally wounded by the explosion, which feels like an anticlimactic end for him.   

Alice rushes the antivirus vial to the surface and drops it with only seconds to spare—only for Isaacs to catch it before it hits the ground. It was a fake out, the grenade didn’t kill him, somehow. The other religious Isaacs comes over with the zombie horde, so now there are two Isaacs who both think they’re the original! Religious Isaacs is shook, so he kills the other one! Then that one is killed by zombies! The villain dying two times in the same scene is as over-the-top as it gets. Old Alice, Wesker, and all those frozen people get blown up along with the rest of The Hive. Main Alice finally unleashes the antivirus just before the zombie horde gets her, and somehow that tiny vial of green liquid is enough to kill everything on earth infected with the T-Virus, which includes herself. Rest in peace, Alice, we hardly knew thee.

But, it’s not quite the end. Surprise: Alice is still alive. How? The Red Queen explains they tricked her (AGAIN!), telling her she would die if the antivirus was released, that way they knew she was willing to make the sacrifice (?!), but only the virus in her was killed. What a terrible explanation. I expected no less. Downloaded childhood memories that Alice apparently lacked all this time are gifted to her and she rides off on a motorcycle, then in voiceover she says her work isn’t done because the antivirus will take years to spread around the world. Thankfully, this is the actual end to the franchise. I don’t think I could have taken one more of these movies with their continual descent into ever greater absurdity.

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is the dumbest, goofiest, and schlockiest entry in the whole franchise, and it’s exactly the kind of ending us fans who stuck with it all this way deserved. Most of the time it feels like nonstop senseless action, which is still an improvement from the last movie. Milla Jovovich tried harder in this one, the villains were more entertaining, the plot was so far flung into the realm of preposterousness that it kept me hooked, and it delivered the schlock goods. To look back on the first movie from this end point, it is staggering to see the path they wobbled along for six whole movies. What started as a relatively straight forward zombie tale with action, monsters, and mysteries thrown in to spice it up ends with numerous clones fighting each other over a tiny vial that will reset the entire world.

We made it to the end of the Resident Evil franchise—or, did we? Well, this is it for the Milla Jovovich-led live-action films, but there is a lot more Resident Evil content out there. In 2021, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City was released, which served as a reboot to the film series and as a more faithful adaptation of the videogames. There were also three computer-animated direct-to-video films made in congruence with the previous live-action films that were unrelated, Resident Evil: Degeneration (2008), Resident Evil: Damnation (2012), and Resident Evil: Vendetta (2017). A new Netflix series unrelated to the previous movies and shows came out this past summer, and because I’m a glutton for punishment, I decided to check it out. One episode was all I could take. It’s worse than the movies in one crucial way: it isn’t so bad that it is fun, it is just plain bad and no fun at all, but don’t worry, it already got cancelled. I think that about wraps it up.

 

This concludes the ninth year of Clayton’s Creepy Cinema, it is the end of my second Sequel-a-Thon, and if I can pull it off again in 2023, I will have completed a whole decade of reviewing horror movies every single day of October! Wish me luck, readers, because with my increasingly busy schedule it won't be easy to accomplish. But, I love watching scary movies and sharing my thoughts on them, and I love writing the reviews for you to enjoy in the spookiest month of the year, so I’m going to do my best to put my plan for next year’s Creepy Cinema into action.

For now, I hope Sequel-a-Thon 2 has been informative, entertaining, and an enjoyable part of your October. Have a fun, safe, and spook-filled Halloween!