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.

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.

Edge of Darkness

Oh boy!  Looks like it's time for another aging man to take the law into his own hands when bad guys attack his family (see Death Wish, Taken, or Death Sentence for other examples).  Honestly, I am all about revenge as a plot device.  It leads to tough guys being bad-ass and bad guys getting hurt in creative ways.  What's not to like?  Oh, you want character development or subtlety?  Read a book.

Edge of Darkness is the American film version of the classic British television series of the same name.  Boston detective Thomas Craven (Mel Gibson) has just brought his adult daughter (Bojana Novakovic) to his home, from the train station, when she gets sick.  They prepare to rush to the hospital, but when they are on the front stoop of Craven's home, a masked man shouts "Craven!" and shoots...but the daughter Craven gets hit instead of Thomas.  And boy, does she get hit!  Wow.  Yeah, it was a shotgun, but that scene was pretty brutal.  Obviously, the police (and Thomas) work under the assumption that the killer was aiming for Thomas and the daughter was an accidental hit.  At least, that was Craven's assumption, until he discovered that his daughter was radioactive.

Huh?  Radioactive?  Really?  Excuse me, how can radioactivity fit into my can't-miss revenge movie formula?  It can't?  Crap.

Yes, Craven's daughter was radioactive and that's why she was sick.  Now, I think we all know that you don't just accidentally get radiation poisoning (unless you're making the film adaptation of XXX-Ray Love: The Marie and Pierre Curie Story).  There's always some evil corporation and/or government behind it.  Such is the case here.  Jack Bennett (Danny Huston) is in charge of the evil corporation, which has strong ties to the government.  The ties are so strong, in fact, that they receive help from the government, in the form of CIA operative Darius Jedburgh (Ray Winstone).  Darius is the guy you send in to cover things up when you don't care how many bodies pile up, as long as the job gets done.

As soon as Craven realizes that his daughter was practically glowing in the dark, he stops acting as a police officer.  He takes evidence from her apartment and burns it, in case it incriminated her as an environmental activist.  Darius decides to pay Craven a visit at this time; he probably should kill Craven, especially since he's a detective that is clearly veering from the law.  This should be the end of the movie.  But, Darius likes the cut of Craven's jib, apparently, and encourages Craven to do whatever he has to do, by any means necessary.  The second half of the film has Craven doing just that.

I didn't think you could make a revenge movie overcomplicated, but director Martin Campbell made it happen.  I just don't understand it.  If this movie had just made the daughter an innocent victim, then Craven would have had to pummel his way through the undoubtedly enormous backlog of thugs that he sent to prison.  That would have been awesome.

Instead, he "detects" his way around and finds all the answers, nice and neat, relatively quickly and painlessly (aside from his daughter and a few other peripheral characters dying).  There is a convoluted cover-up in place, but he has little difficulty getting past it.  And I love that there is a corporation at fault, but Craven finds only one guy to blame.  And he's right!  There is only one person responsible for a radiation-tinged conspiracy.  Do you know how evil you have to be to pull that off?  Skeletor-level evil.  Let's just pretend that corporations occasionally have one evil master that murders innocents in outlandish ways and has the government's help in covering it all up.  If I accept that, I find it incredibly hard to swallow that nobody pulls a grassy knoll on Craven's noggin.

And another thing...who is Craven's boss, Mr. Burns?  Craven says that he's not taking a leave of absence after his daughter dies.  Fine.  He then stops by the police station one more time before ignoring it for the rest of the film.  The police even call him with updates on his daughter's case, but nobody calls and asks if he's running late, or maybe to ask if he's decided to take that leave?  I want that job, right now.  Minus the whole thing with my daughter's blood splatter-painting my front door.

This movie frustrates me because it has a lot of potential.  Martin Campbell is a good action director (he's directed two good Bond movies) and the cast is decent.  Mel Gibson hasn't made a movie in years, but he gets to be a tough guy, which is something he's always been good at.  Ray Winstone takes a role that could be played as disinterested or tired and gives his character some depth; he doesn't demand much of the spotlight, but I appreciated his performance.  The rest of the supporting cast is unspectacular, but not bad.  Jay O. Sanders is decent as Craven's cop buddy, Shawn Roberts does the best he can with a dumb character, and Bojana Novakovic looks somewhat pretty in her limited screen time.  I was majorly disappointed by Danny Huston as the evil corporate head.  It's not just that his character is one-dimensional, or that he would have been less ridiculous if he had tied Craven's daughter to railroad tracks to kill her.  My problem is that  Huston plays this unlikable character as completely unlikable.  There's no wicked charm, or smart remarks.  He's just a douche and you want him to die.

Even with the goofiness of the plot, this is still a decently entertaining movie.  Gibson and Winstone are in fine form, and they make up a good portion of the movie.  This definitely is an underwhelming return to the screen for Gibson, but it's far from his worst work.  It's too bad, really, given what this movie could have been.  Still, if you like seeing old men beat up and kill jerks, then this movie has something to offer.