Resident Evil: Retribution

After so many installments, it is getting harder and harder to overlook some basic problems with the Resident Evil franchise.  With the fifth (I know!) volume, Resident Evil: Retribution, I have to point out upfront what has ruined my suspension of disbelief: I have a hard time buying into an international evil organization, hell-bent on ruining the world that manages to keep finding glove-tight leather outfits for Milla Jovovich to kick ass in.  We're four movies into a global zombie apocalypse, and they still have someone working a bondage/tailoring shop?  Sure, it's obviously a solid investment when the zombie apocalypse comes a-knocking --- What would Milla wear, otherwise?  Capris? --- but you think somebody would at least brag about having the foresight for this eventuality.  If this was my movie, that would be the only thing discussed in the trailer.

***DISCLAIMER: The plot of Resident Evil: Retribution is pretty damn ridiculous, so forgive me if I simplify or gloss over some of the finer points in this plot summary***

When last we left Alice (Milla Jovovich), she was on an aircraft carrier, about to take on the forces of the evil Umbrella Corporation.

This picture perfectly encapsulates all Resident Evil plots

The next thing you know, Alice has woken up to an idyllic suburban life, where she has a husband and a child.  But then zombies happen.  Again.  The next thing you know (again), Alice wakes up in an unnecessarily bright and clean room, wearing only a small towel.  Why a towel?  Did she slip and hit her head coming out of the shower?  Are her hot pants at the cleaner?  Is this just a subtle clue that the zombie virus began with mildew accumulating in Milla's towel because she can't be bothered to hang it up like a grown damn woman, and I sure as shit don't need to keep picking up after her --- if she really respected me, she wouldn't be so thoughtless in the shared space of our bathroom, right?

Stained-glass floors.  Classy touch, evil corporation.

Actually, that stupid idea is only slightly less reasonable than the shoulder shrug reasoning of the actual script.  Although having the entire Resident Evil franchise be the concussed dream of Alice, after a bathroom-related head injury, would be pretty hilarious.  Anyway, the villain of the last four films, Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), has taken the time to bleach his hair.  Almost as importantly, Wesker tells Alice that he is no longer part of the evil Umbrella Corporation.  Now he wants to help humanity, which makes as much sense as anything else in this series.  It seems that The Umbrella Corporation has been taken over by a virtual intelligence called the Red Queen.

Note: the worst CGI in this series is for a computer-generated character

Umbrella and the Queen have captured Alice and cloned the crap out of her and a lot of other people (many we have seen in previous Resident Evil movies), running simulation after simulation, and using Alice's unique physiology (I think) to perfect the zombie disease.  Wesker wants to help Alice escape the of-course-it's-underwater Umbrella station she is in, so he sends in some help, in the form of Ada Wong (Bingbing Li).  All the two of them have to do is fight their way across three city-sized zombie experiments and meet up with Wesker's extraction team. 

That sounds easy enough

There are a lot of returning characters to Resident Evil: Retribution, but the acting is at the level the series is known for (hint: the bar is not set high).  This is actually Milla Jovovich's best work in the series to date, as she not only kicks ass and looks sexy, but she also manages to deliver a few one-liners.  It's not impressive work by most standards, but for an actress as wooden as Jovovich, it is worth noting.  How about the rest of the cast?  Well, there are some newcomers.  Bingbing Li is pretty and wore some fantastically inappropriate clothes for fighting zombies, but it all of her dialogue was dubbed over in post-production.  And it looked like it, too.

An evening dress is a solid choice for outrunning zombies, right?

Aryana Engineer was adequate as the completely useless little girl that Alice took with her, but she was less of a character and more of a plot device.  Johann Urb played Leon Kennedy, the main character from the fifth RE video game, and he has a little less characterization than your average video game character; in case his haircut bothers you, that was also inspired by the game.  Kevin Durand also plays a character from the games.  While his role in the movie seemed somewhat minor, I thought Durand did a solid job as an unnecessarily macho character.  The returning cast sees Sienna Guillory, Shawn Roberts, and Boris Kodjoe survive the last film, with Michelle Rodriguez, Oded Fehr, and Colin Salmon having their now-dead characters cloned, with Fehr and Rodriguez doing double duty as both "good" and "bad" clones. On the whole, there is less "acting" in this movie than there is "shouting until something explodes," but that is to be expected.  Nobody (except for Li) was embarrassingly bad, but this is a movie about a supermodel who fights zombies in a leather bodysuit --- good acting was never in the cards.

Thankfully, "posing with weapons" was

Luckily, writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson was well aware of that fact, and made a movie that played to both the franchise's and his own strengths: CGI action sequences.  If you're looking for ninety minutes of mindless action sequences, Resident Evil: Retribution may be the film for you.  Anderson has a knack for making Jovovich look like a formidable action hero, and his production of action scenes is some of the smoothest in the business right now.  That doesn't make up for his shortcomings as a screenwriter, but at least he's not spending a lot of time trying and failing to have these characters force emotions or a lot of hammy jokes.  

Although a "women driving" line would have been good here

After watching this film with Danny O'D, we both reached the same conclusion with regards to Paul W.S. Anderson's talents: it's not that he's a good director or anything, but it is nice that he keeps making action movies for Milla Jovovich to be a sex object in.  She's not exactly old here, but how many other 37-year old actresses have this kind of opportunity to kill fake things and be ogled by audiences in genuinely profitable films?  The answer, obviously, is "not enough."  Hollywood has failed to generate a new generation of dumb action heroes as Stallone and Schwarzenegger have aged into irrelevance, so why not make some scripts for aging (by Hollywood standards) beauties that may or may not have acting talent?  Just retool an old Chuck Norris movie for someone like Jennifer Love-Hewitt or Jenny McCarthy and have them fight Communist zombie ninjas.  How hard is that?  It's obviously working for Kate Beckinsale.

Note: I would also watch Michelle Rodriguez fighting Nazi alien terrorists

Okay, so Resident Evil: Retribution isn't a legitimately good movie.  How is it in terms of action movies, or at least the other Resident Evil movies?  The action certainly looks good in Retribution, and there is an awful lot of it.  But there is also a lot of stupid plotting, despite the fact that this movie feels like an hour and a half of mindless action.  Did this story need to keep tabs on Leon Kennedy and the other gun-toting "characters" that were meeting up with Alice?  Absolutely not.  Did we need Alice to care for a child?  Lord, no.  How about changing the villain in the series out of absolutely nowhere?  That was only slightly less stupid than filling the cast with recognizable actors who were "only" clones, and therefore perfectly expendable.
  Look, the less attention you pay to this horrible excuse for a story (example: whatever happened to Ali Larter and Wentworth Miller after the last movie, anyway?), the better off you are.

More of this, less of deaf children

However, even glossing over the plot doesn't make this film a must-see.  The best action movies have cool heroes doing cool things that kill bad guys.  The action scenes in Retribution are very smooth and generally look pretty good and lots of bad guys die, but these scenes don't always make a lot of sense.  That wouldn't be a huge knock on the movie, but Alice is a dull heroine.  When you add zero charisma to nonsensical action and a terrible plot, you get a sub-par movie.  Still, this is a movie about a zombie-killing woman in a vacuum-sealed catsuit; it may not be great, but it at least plays up what it does well. 

Within the Resident Evil series, I would say that Retribution is slightly worse than Resurrection, but still a little better than Apocalypse.  Given the $220 million Resident Evil: Retribution has made, it looks like we'll be seeing a sixth Milla RE movie soon.  With any luck, it will be a little less idiotic and a little more sensational.  And then, most likely, we'll see a reboot two years later.

Faces in the Crowd

 

I have established a routine of reviewing the best and worst of the previous year just in time for the Oscars.  If they can wait until the end of February, why can't I, right?  That means that I am trying to fit a lot of 2011 releases in for review in January and February.  Hence Faces in the Crowd.  Normally, I wouldn't touch a Milla Jovovich movie with a ten foot pole, unless it involved killing zombies.  That's just a general rule that has served me well over the years.  Faces in the Crowd is what happens when you break the rules.

...and this is what happens when you break her concentration: blank stares

Here's the plot: Anna (Milla Jovovich) is living the good life --- she has friends, a handsome byofriend, and is a successful teacher with model-quality looks --- until she accidentally witnesses a serial killer in the act.  She tries to escape, and I suppose she does; she falls off a bridge, into a body of water, hitting her head on the way down.  That might scramble a lesser person's brains, but Anna's got quite the noggin and emerges with prosopagnosia.  That's essentially a form of brain damage that prevents a person from recognizing faces.  In practice, that means that Anna sees a new face whenever a person leaves the room; in practice, her boyfriend looks different every morning and every evening as he returns from work.  My immediate thought --- echoed by Anna's slutty friend --- is that she gets to be monogamous and still sleep with new people, but this isn't a lighthearted sex romp.  This is a drama, nay, a thriller, dammit!  So Anna has witnessed a serial killer at work and is the only surviving witness, but she couldn't ID the guy if he was standing right next to her.  That would only be mildly inconvenient, if it wasn't for the fact that the killer is stalking her at close range.

ACTING!

Wow.  Faces in the Crowd takes an interesting phenomenon and completely misses the mark.  The first problem I have with this movie is with Milla Jovovich.  She can't act.  Not surprised, not happy, not afraid, not disinterested, not mildly constipated.  If you cast Milla Jovovich in your movie and are expecting her to carry a dramatic role (as in, "not one where the acting is obscured by action FX") you damn well better make sure she is clothed appropriately.

An example of "appropriate"

Man, she is terrible here.  She plays a schoolteacher that regularly goes out drinking with her slutty wannabe Sex In the City friends, never seems to grade papers, and looks like this when she's stressed:

I'm surprised this movie's not titled Faces Acting Subtly.  The rest of the cast is better than Milla, but so was my preschool class performance of the Billy Goats Gruff (I was a troll and fussed over having green makeup on my cheeks, because makeup is for girls!  Yuck!).  Julian McMahon plays the cop tracking down the serial killer that magically seems immune to Anna's mental disability; she recognizes his face every time!  It's not that remarkable, though...his goatee is just that awful.

Not a Robin Hood remake

The rest of the cast is a mixed bag.  Due to the requirements of the story, most of the characters were played by multiple actors.  So, even if you love The Walking Dead's Sarah Wayne Callies, she's only actually in about ten percent of this movie.  Similarly, Valentina Vargas was not given much of a chance to shine as the super-slutty foreign friend, even though the character had Isabella Rosellini-in-Roger Dodger-potential.  As for David Atrakchi...let's just say that it's too bad he never got substituted for Demitri Martin in this movie.  (That is me subtly pointing out his lack of dramatic acting chops).  Oh, and Marianne Faithfull shows up to play a cynical therapist, if only to rasp at a new audience.

Faces in the Crowd isn't all bad, though.  It's pretty terrible, don't get me wrong, but there were some things I liked.  I liked the concept behind this movie.  Who do you trust when you can't trust your eyes?  I like that.  And writer/director Julien Magnat found an interesting way to manifest Anna's disability, by having different actors play the same part, with the original actor supplying the voice.  Sometimes, strangers would all share the same face.  That was all pretty cool.  It's too bad that the acting is wretched and the basic plot (the mystery) is hammy and predictable.

Don't protect her.  She needs to hear the truth.

What's worse than all that is how ridiculous the plot is.  First of all, I hated how easily the story got rid of Anna's existing boyfriend, who suddenly became a total prick when his girlfriend suffered brain damage.  Here is an attractive woman who is clearly trying her best to fake her way through life, despite a mental retardation, and he gets self-righteous?  Weak.  I mean, this is a guy who could totally berate and take out his anger on his girlfriend, just by changing his tie and using a silly voice, the very stuff of a Wayans Brothers comedy --- and he gives that up because she sees different faces when they have sex?  What planet is he from?  And then there is the cop played by McMahon, who explicitly denies Anna protective custody (despite her being his only witness) because it is a paperwork hassle.

"I'd take my hands out of my pockets, but, you know...red tape"

The plot is so cheesy that Anna reads her horoscope out loud, ferchrissakes, and it always applies to her day!

Scorpio: "You will smoosh your face in despair..."

One of the worst things about Faces in the Crowd is how pointlessly long it is.  This isn't a long movie, mind you, but there is a point where it is obvious that the killer character is wearing exactly the same clothes as Anna's boyfriend, and the boyfriend sees the guy, and Anna's friend gets killed that night by someone wearing the exact same clothes as the boyfriend ---- and nobody thinks to ask the boyfriend what this doppelganger looks like!  I would have been satisfied if the boyfriend gave a mediocre description, but ignoring the fact that he saw the killer bugged the hell out of me.  All of that pales in comparison to the idiocy of Anna's character when she tried to go back to teaching young schoolchildren.  She went back to work without telling her boss about her condition and apparently walked into class without a game plan to handle not recognizing the faces of 30+ kids.  As a friend, sibling, nephew, and son of teachers, I have to call bullshit there.  For all the work teachers do off the clock, I simply cannot believe that an elementary school teacher wouldn't foresee the problem of not recognizing her students, especially when her boss references her as his "best" teacher.  Faces in the Crowd takes a decent premise and dumbs it down into a dull, poorly paced thriller that doesn't even deserve quotation marks around it.

The one good thing that resulted from me watching this movie was that it reminded me of Marianne Faithfull's 2002 album, which featured this song, written by Jarvis Cocker.  Sure, it's dirty and he covered it on his next solo album, but this is where I heard it first.

Marianne Faithfull - Sliding through life on charm by Superpatri

Resident Evil: Afterlife

Say what you will about the Resident Evil series, this fact is undeniable: every movie features a model killing zombies.  That's got to be worth something, right?  After the success of Resident Evil: Extinction, the filmmakers had the chance to make a fourth movie in the franchise.  But what could possibly follow an extinction?  And that is how Resident Evil: Afterlife came to be.

The movie opens with several dozen super-powered Alice (Milla Jovovich) clones attacking the headquarters of the evil Umbrella Corporation and its chairman, Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), the man ultimately responsible for turning the world into zombies.  Why are there dozens of Alices?  Why do they have super-powers?  Don't expect to find out much in this movie.  It's not terribly important, though, since Wesker kills all the Alice clones with a bomb and injects Alice Prime with a chemical that makes her a normal human again.  Well, I suppose normal is relative, since her next act is to survive a helicopter crash, uninjured.

Having destroyed the Umbrella Corporation headquarters and presumably killing Wesker (even though he reveals his own super-powers), Alice tries to meet up with her friends from Extinction, at the supposedly zombie infection-free town, Arcadia.  Alice finds and flies a two-seat propeller plane to Arcadia's coordinates in Alaska, but finds only the abandoned remains of her friends' plane.  She then finds Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), her friend from the last movie, crazed and with amnesia.  Together, they look for more surivors down the Pacific coast, eventually landing (barely) on a prison roof in Los Angeles.  There, they meet a motley bunch of survivors, including their leader and former pro basketball player, Luther (Boris Kodjoe), a narcissistic movie producer, Bennett (Kim Coates), and Chris Redfield (Wentworth Miller), the only man still locked up in the prison.  These survivors have new information about Arcadia: it's not a town, but a boat that travels up and down the Pacific coast, broadcasting its zombie-free atmosphere with its current coordinates, around the clock.  But Alice's plane can only hold one passenger at a time, and she was lucky to land safely once.  How will they ever reach the safety of Arcadia?

Do you really want to know about the acting?  Alright, fine.  Milla Jovovich is fairly pretty and shoots things in the head.  I would criticize her acting, but the script wisely avoids giving her varying emotions, so she actually comes across as reasonably capable here.  Ali Larter, on the other hand, is not terribly talented, and not even a slow-motion, water-soaked action sequence is going to change that.  Boris Kodjoe is reasonably likable and Bennett is thoroughly unlikable --- which means that both played their parts well.  I've seen potatoes have a stronger likeness to real humans than Wentworth Miller, whose archnemesis continues to be his confusion of "raspy voice" with "intensity."  Shawn Roberts gets to do his best Agent Smith impression, but comes across as a generic evil character.  Granted, many of these characters come from the video game franchise (although, oddly enough, not Alice), so their ridiculousness might come from the source material, but I don't care enough to research that thought any further.

I have to admit that writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson does a good job connecting this film to the last chapter in the series.  While I only vaguely remember the first two movies, the third one wasn't bad and included explanations for the Alice clones and (I think) Alice's super-powers.  The opening scene was a nice nod to fans of the film franchise, even if he did effectively negate all of those plot developments only minutes later.  And killing the clones and de-powering Alice made the movie more accessible to casual viewers, which was another smart move.  And that might be the last time you ever see a Resident Evil movie called "smart."


Technically, this is a pretty solid action movie.  The special effects are very good and the primary ass-kickers are women, which is a nice change of pace.  The characters and dialogue are lacking, but that's not too shocking for a video game adaptation, is it?  The problem with this movie is that we have seen it all before.  Zombies with weird mouths that, when they get ready to eat you, look like starfish?  Check.  Weird, starfish-faced dogs?  Check again.  Villain who all but places his hands on his hips to shout "MWA-HA-HA"?  Triple check.  The zombies aren't even a credible threat for most of this movie, if they ever were.  Instead, Wesker and the Umbrella Corporation are the enemy, and their ultimate plot is obnoxiously ridiculous; they are effectively a technological Big Brother, aware of everyone important, anywhere, despite the fact that the world has been falling apart for a few years now.  None of this adds up to a bad movie, exactly, but it's just not very fun to watch.

Is it too much to ask for a single, likable character in my action movies?  I don't think so, and I know that Milla doesn't have the chops to be that character.  This movie is somewhat stupid, but not silly enough to be fun.  It just travels the same path as the last few movies, without the innovations introduced in the third, and arrives at the same end, more or less.  A side note on the ending: when it's all said and done, I don't think they have worked out the logistics (food, water, travel, fuel, etc.) of their actions.  I guess it just boils down to this: I am bored with this franchise.  The movie made nearly $300 million in the box office, so a fifth movie (I know!  Five!) seems inevitable, but I'm not really interested.