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! 

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!