Resident Evil: Retribution (2012) Review

Resident Evil: Retribution (2012) Review

 

Even though Resident Evil: Afterlife was ultimately a disappointment, I was still eager to see Alice's next adventure, although in retrospect I don’t know why. I guess I just hoped to see Milla Jovovich kick the butts of bigger and badder villains and eventually bring down the evil Umbrella Corporation once and for all. I saw Retribution in 3D in theaters when it came out, and I went in to it confident that it couldn’t be as bad as Afterlife.

We begin with the aerial assault on the deck of the ship where Afterlife left off, and the whole action sequence with the credits playing over it is shot in slow motion and played in reverse. It’s pretty cool, but there’s nothing particularly 3D about it, and at no point in the rest of the movie is the 3D as inventive or as in-your-face as it was in Afterlife, which I found hugely disappointing. If you aren’t going to go all-out with it, why bother? Jill Valentine is back for the first time since Apocalypse, and she randomly appears in the opening, shooting at Alice and wearing a weird new outfit. She’s not the only one back from previous movies, as we will soon find out.

After the titles conclude we transition into the usual recap by Alice. It’s all told with floating video squares showing footage from previous movies moving around in a black void, as well as Alice looking right at the audience as she talks, which is a little uncomfortable. It's the most exhaustive recap yet, with some very random callbacks that don’t immediately seem relevant. The whole Jill-Valentine-is-evil-now-because-of-Umbrella-thing is brushed off in like one second. After the recap finally ends, we see the same action scene as before play again, only not in reverse and sped up, then we jump to Alice waking up in bed in a quaint home in the suburbs with different hair and a deaf daughter and Carlos who died in Resident Evil: Extinction as her husband! What the hell is going on?

We barely get any time for this new reality to sink in before zombies barge into the house and attack them. It feels like a direct rip-off of the opening to Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake. You can tell it’s trying to be scary and thrilling but it is successful in neither way, it feels generic and yet confusing. For Alice, though, it’s only confusing; she has no idea what is happening. Gee, think she might be a clone and not the real Alice? Michelle Rodriguez’ character (don’t know her name and don’t care enough to look it up) saves her and her daughter—wait, didn’t she die in the first movie? I guess Umbrella cloned her too, somehow—but before she can even begin to explain anything to Alice, she crashes her car and the zombies catch up and kill them.

The real Alice then wakes up in Umbrella Prime and Jill Valentine interrogates her using the most obnoxious alarm sounds possible before the security system suddenly becomes disabled. Alice is given another new badass outfit for some reason and finds herself in the hallway of lasers from the first movie again, only they're red this time and look far worse than they did originally! How is it even possible to make cgi lasers that look faker than the ones from ten years earlier? Instead of a fun callback like it was in Extinction, it just feels lazy this time.

Alice runs out a door and is suddenly in Tokyo. How? At first it seems she’s in a computer simulation, but everything looks pretty real—in fact it looks basically like the opening of the last movie, complete with the slow-mo and the rain and the zombie that attacks the random guy on the crosswalk. She ends up back in a sterile white hallway fighting zombies and splattering their blood and brains all over the place. I love a good over-the-top-fight, especially the ones in these movies, and this one is pretty fun, but guess what? We’re 25 minutes in already, and it still feels like the movie hasn't really started. We have no idea what is happening or why.

She ends up in central control, where another woman in a red dress with a gun (basically an Asian version of Alice from the first movie) and Wesker (somehow still alive!) have turned on Umbrella and hacked their network or main frame or whatever, and Alice is in their main underground testing facility in Russia. Why does such a facility exist? How could it exist? Apparently it was so they could test the T-Virus, but it doesn’t really matter, the point is this plot allows Paul W.S. Anderson to literally re-use everything from the last four movies, making it like a Resident Evil greatest hits album. It should have been called Resident Evil Retreadbution!

Wesker is just a giant talking head on a screen, telling us everything we need to know for the rest of the movie to get going. What a joke. Meanwhile, a strike team arrives to help Alice break out, including Luther West, who was one of the survivors in the prison from Afterlife. Jill Valentine is tracking Alice, being controlled by one of those red mechanical bug things that controlled Claire in the last movie. Guess what’s in control of the bug/Jill? The Red Queen! Even she is back, again, and she tells Alice “You're all going to die down here” to which Alice says “I've heard that before” and it is a majorly cringe-worthy callback.

Resident Evil: Retribution reminds me of old video games I used to play where the penultimate level would reuse enemies from previous levels and make you fight them all over again before the final boss. That's what a lot of this movie is like: Alice fighting old enemies again, as well as previously good characters now turned bad. Speaking of bad, should I even comment on how bad this movie looks overall? It has some of the worst visuals so far, which is kind of amazing considering how bad Afterlife looked at points. I will say the cgi for the same monster from the first and second movies looks much better, but everything around it looks horrible. Some of the damage and vehicle visual effects actually look unfinished. 

Along with her new partner in the red dress, Alice finds her dead clone in the suburb scenario and the daughter who somehow survived. This new red dress chick just spouts annoying exposition and is not a fun character to have Alice paired with. Alice discovering her clone’s daughter is just as dull as the other stuff going on with the strike team fighting Russian zombies. Not even a Russian zombie with a chainsaw can be cool, it’s ruined with bad cgi blood effects, and we don’t even know who the strike team members are at all, minus Luther West, whose one distinguishing characteristic from the last movie is that he used to be an actor before the apocalypse and that is it.

A team of characters who are all supposed to be dead (including Carlos, Michelle Rodriguez, and even the team leader from the original played by Colin Salmon) show up to kill Alice, and more senseless shooting ensues. Milla Jovovich reminds me of Ripley from Alien 3 with how done she looks and sounds with everything that's going on, except Sigourney Weaver was still great in that disappointing sequel. Jovovich can’t even deliver fun lines with much gusto this time around. The strike team and Alice eventually meet up, but the Red Queen is still on to them. Whenever it cuts to the Red Queen overlaid on the right side of the screen it looks and feels exactly like a video game, in case you’ve forgotten these movies are supposed to be based on games. One of the monsters steals Alice's kid, making it the first time it has ever not immediately killed someone. On the topic of the Alien franchise again, Alice going after the kid is a blatant rip-off of Aliens when Ripley goes after Newt.

Retribution seriously lacks the fun schlock from previous entries. There is just so much senseless shooting, and without any new characters to enjoy, I was actually more disappointed with it than Afterlife despite the comparably greater potential of its preposterous premise. I’ll sum up the last of the plot, but let me say right now this is the laziest sequel and one of the worst entries in the series. Alice saves her daughter and they blow up the entire massive facility with just a few explosives, but it isn’t over yet unfortunately. On the ice in Russia they cross paths with a submarine, and out comes Jill Valentine, red dress chick, and Michelle Rodriguez. Michelle injects herself with a parasite that makes her able to heal her wounds, and Jill takes out a spiky staff to fight Alice with. Alice uses ice climbing hooks to fight Jill, Michelle fights the other strike team guys, it’s snowing, and the use of slow-mo is more balanced, so it's a better looking final fight than the one in Afterlife, but it's more boring watching Alice fight another human instead of a weird monster.

Jill lays such an intense beat down on Alice that she actually gets the upper hand and almost kills her, but then at the last second Alice is somehow able to remove the red mechanical spider thing from Jill’s chest that's been making her evil. Michelle Rodriguez punches Luther West so hard in the chest it stops his heart and kills him, then she does the same thing to Alice, but she doesn’t die. You know why? Because her real super power is having her husband write these movies. Alice beats her, and boy is she worn out by the end of the movie. I share the same sentiment.  

But we aren’t done quite yet! Here’s the set up for the next movie: Alice goes to Wesker, he injects her with her old powers again, she threatens to kill him, but he says she has work to do first, and instead of killing him she just sighs, then there’s a massive zoom out shot showing us the White House, looking all fortified and being attacked by millions of zombies and flying monsters. Let’s do this one more time and wrap up this shit fest on Halloween baby!