Resident Evil: Retribution 3D

RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION 3D

** SPOILERS **

Waiting in an empty theater for the fifth(!) Resident Evil movie to start, recalling bad memories of the very bad previous entry in this undying franchise, Resident Evil: Afterlife, I took to Twitter:

It's been five fucking Resident Evil movies -when is Alice going to beat the Umbrella Corporation already? She is completely incompetent.
— John Orquiola (@BackoftheHead) September 15, 2012

Who ever heard of a superhero who can't beat the villain after 5 movies? Every other superhero wins within 3. Alice sucks. #ResidentEvil
— John Orquiola (@BackoftheHead) September 15, 2012

I was kind of rough on ol' Alice, I admit. Her troubles aren't really her fault, nor is her inability to gain a total victory against her enemies. The Resident Evil franchise, while one of the few boasting an unbeatable female action hero as its centerpiece, is a stacked deck against that very heroine. There is no way for Alice to win. She can't ever kill every zombie or get total revenge against the evil Umbrella Corporation. She never has control over her fate or the means to gain that control. Resident Evil doesn't play fair and it never did. The best Alice can ever do is clinch her jaw, pick up some guns, somersault, kick, shoot, and punch zombies and  Umbrella henchmen until the requisite 90 minutes are up. Then she gets a break for a couple of years until she has to do it all over again. Poor Alice.

Resident Evil: Retribution ("retribution" is the word chosen from the dictionary this time around) opens with a rather impressive 3D action set piece where all the action happens in slow motion reverse. When last we saw Alice (Milla Jovovich) and her friends K-Mart (Spencer Locke), and bad ass brother and sister Chris and Claire Redfield (Wentworth Miller and Ali Larter), they were on a barge called Arcadia with a bunch of humans they freed from Umbrella. They had about 7.2 seconds to relax before a helicopter armada led by Alice's mind-controlled old buddy from Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), attacked them. The opening credit sequence of the attack happening backwards is the best trick the franchise has offered in all five movies. Also appreciated is Alice giving an explicit rundown of the events of the previous four Resident Evils (starting of course with her "My name is Alice..." introduction) to get everyone up to speed on what the hell is going on. Two pleasing back to back services for the audience.

Then Alice wakes up naked in an Umbrella facility and we're back to familiar Resident Evil ground. Retribution reaches all the way back to the first Resident Evil movie with callbacks and structure: Alice is trapped in an underground facility, the Umbrella Corporation is trying to kill her in the form of the artificial intelligence that controls everything called The Red Queen, which came to sentience as a homicidal little British girl, and Alice has to escape. At least The Red Queen was kind enough to give her a sexy skintight S&M leather jumpsuit to wear instead of the flimsy red dress Alice had to fight in before. Maybe The Red Queen just wanted Alice to match Jill Valentine's sexy blue skintight S&M leather jumpsuit. Coming to aid Alice from the real world are the Dudes With Attitudes, including a couple of characters from the video games who hadn't made it into the movies until now, and the black guy from Resident Evil: Afterlife who survived. They all take their marching orders from the former head of the Umbrella Corporation, best described as The Worst Agent Smith Knockoff Ever.

Also making return appearances are the corridor with the laser grid that slices and dices people to itty bitty bits, some monsters from the previous movies, and familiar faces who died in the inaugural film like Oded Fehr and Michelle Rodriguez. How can they be back? Simple: they're clones. The Umbrella base, located deep underneath Siberian ice, is not only a virtual reality playground, but a massive cloning facility. One questions why Umbrella only sold their zombie-creating T-virus when they could have also made a fortune with their technology to create perfect clones. There are surely dozens of uses for perfect clones of Milla Jovovich. Why, I can think of a couple.

Resident Evil: Retribution goes back to basics and gets as video-gamey as possible: Alice is given a map and a mission to cross the underground base and it's virtual reality settings of Tokyo, New York, "Suburbia", and Moscow (it's like the Umbrella version of EPCOT Center down there) to get to submarine pens and safety. In every level on the map, there will of course be a Boss Battle. Alice has a sidekick named Ida Asian - wait, no, IMDB says her name is "Ada Wong" - and soon Alice comes across the dead clone of herself who lived in the Suburbia that got attacked by zombies. She also meets a little girl clone who was the dead Alice's daughter. Alice decides, well, if a clone of me is this clone's mom and that clone is dead, then I guess I'm this clone's mom now. That is literally her thought process, and the most the movie offers her in terms of a character arc.

Of course, Alice makes it out of that Umbrella facility. Of course, some of the Dudes With Attitudes die. Of course, there are gun fights and karate fights and a lot of zombies being killed and explosions and ugly CGI monsters with weird, gross tentacles coming out of their mouths. This time around, though, most of the action happens in slo-mo. Resident Evil: Retribution goes absolutely apeshit with the slo-mo. Almost everything Alice does is in slo-mo - Guys, seriously, if you were gonna pad this thing with so much slo-mo, you could have also added maybe a little more story beyond the shambles of a screenplay you slapped together. Retribution is basically a pop up book where you turn the pages very slowly.

On the other hand, the gang's all here. The Resident Evil reunion of Jovovich, Fehr, Guillory, and Rodriguez is neat to see. Rodriguez plays a challenging dual role where one of her clones is the same gruff killer as in the first movie ("You haven't changed a bit," Alice mocks her) while another is an upbeat, suburban "Hey guys, what's going on?" smiley version of the same character. Sadly, Ali Larter missed out on this Resident Evil hang out. (Alice asking the direct question "What happened to Chris and Claire Redfield?" is met with no answer and a move along.) Alice has chop socky showdowns with both Rodriguez, superpowered by some sort of virus, and Guillory, superpowered via Red Queen mind control, and wins both, but not without getting her ass handed to her and taking a couple of pro wrestling moves like the Bionic Elbow and the Heart Punch. Even Bane would have been frustrated with how long it took Alice to realize that she can beat Jill Valentine if she just yanked that GLOWING RED SPIDER THING off her chest, but like Batman did Bane's mask, she eventually figured it out.

All's well that ends well in Resident Evil land? No, of course not. Resident Evil movies don't have endings, to Alice's chagrin. They just have set ups for the next movie, and this one is a total bummer: whisked away to the war-torn remains of Washington, DC, Alice, who did just fine the last two movies without her superpowers, is tricked by The Worst Agent Smith Knockoff Ever (seriously, why would you ever trust that Eurotrash asshole? He never even takes off his sunglasses) into becoming superpowered again. Why? So she can help them fight off The Billion Zombie March that took over Washington and is storming the White House. And you know, you have to give it up to Milla Jovovich by this point. She's really good at snarling and fighting, but you do feel for Alice when Milla gets the "it's just one more goddamned thing after another" look on her face. But she can take heart in knowing that, with the sixth Resident Evil go around pending in a couple of years, the number five she just made it through was not the worst.

In conclusion, Jill Valentine is really pretty.

Actually, Jill Valentine and her plight merits some good, hard questions. For years, after being captured by Umbrella at the end of the second movie, Jill Valentine was under mind control and worked as The Red Queen's chief of security, or something. Apparently, generous as The Red Queen was in selecting sexy attire for her, Jill Valentine was basically a robot for all those years. It didn't seem like she got to live like a normal person. My very good, probing questions are as follows: Did Jill Valentine ever get to take off that jumpsuit? Take a shower, even? If no, geez, what's under there by now? Did she shave her legs ever? Did The Red Queen let her groom her nethers? As she does appear to be relatively clean, it seems like The Red Queen at least let Jill Valentine use the ladies room when nature called. One would hope.

Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D

RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE 3D

** SPOILERS **

Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D opens with a Million Milla Jovovich March on the evil Umbrella Corporation's secret underground city in Tokyo. The previous entry, Resident Evil: Extinction, left Jovovich's titular heroine Alice with awesome telekinetic powers and a battalion of similarly powered clones to do her bidding. Preceded by Milla's husky tough chick narration which starts with (cue eye rolling) "My name is Alice..." then blah blah blah, concluding with (cue eye rolling) "...they were wrong!", the army of Milla clones sieges the underground city and... manages to get themselves all killed. Though they all have earth-shattering telekinesis, only one of the clones chooses to use hers. The rest resort to guns and samurai swords against the heavily armed Umbrella soldiers, and they slaughter each other wholesale.

Meanwhile, the real Alice proves to be just as incompetent as her clones (they got it from the source). While her clones die in waves, Alice decides to hide inside the escape ship of this movie's main villain, The Worst Agent Smith Impressionist Ever, and when she springs into action she promptly... takes a syringe in the neck that depowers her back to humanity. (Alice was too powerful, it was decided by the filmmakers, so time to bring her back down to size. Also, all those powerful clones had to go, so they chose to wipe them out in the most uncreative way possible). The newly human, newly vulnerable Alice then immediately... survives a plane crash into a mountain, walking away relatively unharmed. And so it goes.

Months later, Alice somehow finagles herself a two seater prop airplane with unlimited fuel and heads to Alaska to find out what happened to her friends from Extinction. The "mystery" of Arcadia, the presumed "infection-free" safe zone introduced in Extinction, then takes Alice to zombie-polluted Los Angeles, where a bunch of stereotypes (a Handsome Black Athlete, a Hispanic Cop, an Australian Starlet, a Sleazy Movie Producer, a Gay Asian Intern, and a Mysterious "Criminal") are holed up in a prison fortress. They all want to get to Arcadia, which it turns out is a freighter on the ocean, and Alice agrees to lead them there... somehow. Meanwhile, their haven isn't so safe as some zombies have learned to burrow into the fortress. On one hand, Afterlife plays with the expected conventions of this type of movie: a massive urban assault vehicle a la Aliens that could be their salvation has no engine, forcing them to come up with a different escape route. Not as appreciated a tease was the laborious set up for a sexy Milla Jovovich shower scene that never happens because zombies attack.

Even though Milla is "human" again, she can still perform ridiculous acrobatics, toss her guns in the air in slow-motion, catch them while somersaulting, and blow zombies away with pinpoint accuracy. While Milla is the alpha lioness of this franchise, she actually gets upstaged in the hot, sexy chick department by Ali Larter. Larter, with her buff arms and whirling strawberry blonde hair, is even sexier when she slow motion poses, especially in the 3D rain as she fights off the Giant Zombie With A Giant Axehammer randomly inserted into the movie. (I suppose because as a video game movie, there has to be a Boss Battle every 30-40 minutes.)  It turns out Larter's character Claire Redfield has a brother, who turns out to be the mysterious inmate, played (naturally) by the guy from Prison Break. When the third act hits, Afterlife starts weeding down who the Important Characters are, killing off everyone who isn't Alice, Claire and Chris Redfield (though Handsome Black Athlete inexplicably survives being zombie-attacked in the tunnels under the prison).

Paul W.S. Anderson, the original auteur of the franchise and proud husband of Jovovich, returned to pen and helm Resident Evil: Afterlife. He proudly utilizes "the latest in state-of-the-art 3D technology" to proudly tell a story devoid of anything resembling logical, rational human behavior. Afterlife can hardly even be considered a story: It's just a bunch of stuff that randomly happens. There's no real beginning and no real ending; one has to search very hard to even find a point. After the requisite two hours of nonsense plot and redundant action, the movie simply decides you've had enough for now and just suddenly stops with a stomach-churning (once it dawns on you this franchise still isn't over!) set up for a fifth Resident Evil. (Though I admit, it was nice to finally find out what happened to Jill Valentine from Resident Evil: Apocalypse - even though Sienna Guillory's credit as Jill Valentine appears before the scene does when she makes her return as Umbrella's new big bad. Way to blow the surprise.)

I've subjected myself to every movie in the Resident Evil franchise and Afterlife is the worst of the lot. Please, someone finally put Alice underground where she belongs.

Resident Evil: Extinction (**)

RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION

September 25, 2007

Resident Evil: Extinction was a watchable bad movie. It was better than the second one so it has that in its favor. The first thing that annoyed me was that all of the trailers, TV spots and print ads sell this movie based on the Las Vegas setting but the Vegas sequence is only about ten minutes, fifteen tops.

There were all kinds of dumb logic gaps and plot holes that are typical of a Paul WS Anderson-written movie:

* The beginning where Milla Jovovich runs into the hillbilly family. It had nothing to do with the main story. We figured they were cannibals but instead they just capture people and feed them to zombie dogs. Why does the hillbilly family go through all the trouble of luring people to their town just to feed them to zombie dogs? Why do they even keep a kennel of zombie dogs? How do they get the zombie dogs back in their cages? It's not like zombie dogs take instruction or are trainable. It was a pretty stupid and unnecessary sequence. It doesn't establish Milla is a bad ass; we have two prior movies that told us that. And it didn't set up her new power of telekinesis, which came later. Stupid opener.

* The Umbrella board of directors threatening to take the antivirus project away from the crazy doctor. Why even threaten? If they have someone better at Umbrella who can do the job, why are they even wasting time with the crazy doctor? They don't even like him. The entire interplay of how the Umbrella corporation functions makes no sense. But then I suppose that's why those dumbasses got the entire human race infected and turned into zombies.

* Ali Larter (is hot) having doubts about the plan to take the caravan to Alaska. What was her backup plan? Keep driving around the desert and wait to be eaten? They already established that they had drained all the small towns dry of supplies. Yet the leader of the caravan needed to be convinced to take plan B, a chance at hope, instead of her current plan A of prolonging the inevitable death by zombie consumption.

* Las Vegas buried in sand. WHAT?! First of all, that could never happen in five years. Second, yes, Vegas is in the desert in Nevada, but it's a dry desert. It's not like the surrounding desert is dunes of sand like the Sahara or Tunisia. The explanation of "no one was here to keep the sand away" is retarded. No one in Las Vegas today "keeps the sand away." It makes no sense. Also, it doesn't seem like the filmmakers have ever been to Vegas. There were no casinos or buildings in between the Venetian all the way to the Stratosphere. And when the caravan parks they park in front of the Paris, send someone up the Eiffel Tower, but suddenly they're at the Venetian? Those casinos are at least a half mile apart.

* The scene that made me laugh out loud was when the crazy doctor injected a zombie with antivirus and restores a portion of his humanity temporarily. First, he hands him a cell phone. Zombie remembers how to use it. Then a digital camera. Oh sure, the zombie knows how that works. Point and click. After the zombie proves he can recognize complicated items, THEN he hands him the child's toy! "Circle... not fit in square? GRRAARRR! I'll kill you!"

I very quickly got tired of the lousy one-liners passing for dialogue:

"Sorry about this, Stevie."
"Maybe the desert took it back."
"Good thing we like a challenge."
"I wish I had a smoke."
And so forth. Most of the bad one-liners were delivered in Milla Jovovich's husky "I'm such a bad ass chick" voice. Obviously one doesn't attend Resident Evil movies to hear witty banter but it was still annoying.

There was other stuff I thought was stupid but I can't remember now. Still, though, the movie was all right.

Oh, so what the hell ever happened to Jill Valentine?