Resident Evil: Retribution review

It seems a little silly to do a review of a Resident Evil movie.  Obviously the film is going to be a mindless piece of crap.  Nobody is going into this film with hopes of anything artsy, intelligent, or tasteful.  You are either going to watch this film with hopes of enjoying the mindless action or you are going to go watch something decent.

However, for people like myself who take guilty pleasure in such an awful series, there is some room for criticism.  What I mean by this is that Resident Evil: Retribution can be judged as a good or bad film with regards to the rest of the series, and also in regards to whether the pure entertainment value outweighs the misery of watching a film that just isn’t well made at all.

First off, let’s get the story out of the way.  Alice, the series’ protagonist, wakes up in an Umbrella Corporation prison cell.  She soon escapes, and finds herself trying to escape from the facility with help from Ada Wong (who I have no idea if she has any backstory from the video game franchise), as well as a team including basketball star Luther West from the last film.  They all have to deal with a variety of baddies, including the usual angry zombies, crazy enormous steroid zombies with giant axes, some freakishly huge four-legged beast who seems to have misplaced his skin, a bunch of Umbrella Corporation people including some random familiar faces who were friends but are now brainwashed/evil clones, and of course nefarious Russian zombies who can still use guns, motercycles, and RPGs because Russian zombies are the smartest and most organized zombies of them all.  Included in the story is Alice finding a little girl and having to protect her, which is a nice touch as it adds some emotions to the film and gives Alice some character.  While pretty much the whole film takes place in the Umbrella facility, they change up locations due to simulations running in the facility which recreate suburban America, Japan, Time Square, and Moscow.

If the plot doesn’t seem very complicated, that’s because it’s not, and not even close.  The storyline has as little if not less movement than the previous films.  For the whole film, the characters have only one goal- to escape.  There aren’t any plot twists, and the simple-minded opposition they are facing has one goal the whole film, which is to kill the good guys.    The only real side story is the one with Alice and the little girl Becky, but this storyline takes a back seat to the action for most of the film.  The result of this flat plot is that the scenes seem to be just separate action sequences loosely tied together.  Most of the sequences could have been thought of completely independent of each other, and then all combined with thin pieces of plot to create the final storyline. 

While the scenes may vary, they all seem to suffer from seeming fake.  Yes, they are taking place in a simulation, but what I mean is that they aren’t very lively, and seem like sets rather than actual locations.  For a top-notch film like Avatar, James Cameron puts an insane amount of details into every shot, every location, and that results in Pandora or the ships seemingly incredibly real rather than just a computer generated landscape or a dressed up film studio .  For most scenes in Resident Evil: Retribution, the setting includes the bare minimum.  In the Moscow scenes, there are some iconic Moscow buildings in the background, a small row of shops for the characters to hide in, and the basic characters.  The rest of the city is bare and seems much more like an empty sound stage instead of an empty street in Russia.  In another scene, the fight takes place on a street full of cars and a bus, which would seem like a filled scene.  However, there are no details.  No little shops that are there just for decoration, only bland cars and vehicles that are used directly in the plot, nothing to give a sense that they are in a real location.  This makes the fight feel much flatter than it could, had it taken place in a decent setting.

Finally, we get to the dialogue.  The series has improved its dialogue since the first film, but is still fairly bland.  Most of the dialogue serves to either push the plot along, or let the audience know exactly what is going on because the producers don’t allow anything to be subtle.  However, it didn’t bug me for most of the film.  It certainly wasn’t great dialogue, and I never was compelled to pay close attention to the characters having a conversation, but there was enough action to distract me and the dialogue was usually not bad enough to hurt the film.  There was one point where the dialogue between two characters made me cringe, but that’s better than the first film where almost all the dialogue was cringe-worthy.

So, to wrap up my critical assessment, this is a film that features a flat story, boring locations, and bland dialogue.  I could go into more criticism about how most of the characters seem to be just props, and are almost entirely either recycled characters from previous films or random people with guns, or I could write about how there aren’t many details put into many of the plot points and the audience is just supposed to accept some ridiculous things happening, but instead I want to talk about how I actually enjoyed this film.

Yes, I would rather go to the movie theater and watch a film expected to contend for Best Picture at the Oscars, but sometimes I wake up and decide I don’t want to think.  That’s when I watch a film like this.  And when watching films with no intellectual merit, I have two basic requirements.

First, does the movie really piss me off?  This film had the before-mentioned bit of dialogue that made me cringe, and I did get a little upset at some of the characters.  But overall, I wasn’t yelling at the screen saying how stupid it all was (it was stupid, but not enough to make me angry).  Other films such as Transformers or The Roommate managed to piss me off, and led to me not enjoying the film at all.  It’s hard to say what exactly leads to me being pissed off, but it is often a plot that is so ridiculous that it just doesn’t make sense.  For films like this, I would rather have a very basic plot that doesn’t make me bat an eye than one that is just idiotic and nonsensical.

Second, is the film entertaining?  This film is, thanks to its shooting, driving, and fighting scenes.  This isn’t to say the action scenes are done very well, and at least one is done abysmally, but they include enough violence and slow motion to make my inner 12-year-old boy giggle.

So where do I put this film with regards to the rest of the series?  I would probably rank it second best, after the second film Resident Evil: Apocalypse.  Unlike the previous film, Afterlife, this film has very few down moments where I’m wondering where are the things that Alice needs to kill.  The action is entertaining if not original, and the monsters aren’t anything new or interesting.  However, the film isn’t as bad as the first thanks to much better dialogue and a slightly more lively setting, and just as a personal preference I thought it was more enjoyable than Extinction, which ended up annoying me in too many parts.  However, I enjoyed the characters in Apocalypse much more, since they actually had some depth, and I liked the overall environment/plot much more.  So while this film is one of the more basic of the series, it seems to do more things right and just ends up being enjoyable for fans of the series.

So yes, this is an awful film, but I managed to enjoy it.  Maybe it’s because I like zombie films, maybe it’s because they didn’t do anything to piss me off, but I just liked the film.  I likely won’t watch it again, I won’t recommend it to anyone, and I certainly won’t argue with anyone saying the film was a piece of shit that only appeals to idiots, but this is one of my guilty pleasures for when I don’t want to be an adult.