Tuesday Night Movie – Resident Evil: Retribution

The dormant academic in me wants to see the chaotic latest installment in the Resident Evil series as a commentary on the disposable nature of action cinema, one that reduces the long-running zombie/sci-fi franchise to a dada-esque exercise in pointlessness. The film reviewer in me who had to sit through these 95 minutes of solid white noise, however, has trouble dissociating these ideas from what basically boils down to a stream-of-consciousness pile of drivel wired directly to the screen from the brain of a hormone-addled preteen on a long car trip.

Expectations for the fifth installment of a franchise that I’d basically forgotten about were understandably low. As if they understood that, the filmmakers preface the movie with a confusing montage that explains the events of the first four films, leading up to the moment where our heroine Alice (Milla Jovovich) is thrown into a nightmare end-of-the-world scenario involving a sentient computer, a deadly virus, a deaf daughter/clone (that lends the film the exact same character arc as Ripley and Newt from Aliens) and bad guys who take the form of her former friends. There’s barely any context to establish the flurry of incomprehensible action scenes that follow, a solid 80-minute chunk of kicking, shooting and exploding zombified dragons that never gets the viewer more excited than you are while reading these words.

With its unnatural backlighting, herky-jerky movements and perpetual menu screen overlays, Resident Evil: Retribution looks like a video game; in the way it showcases repetitive chaos without ever letting the viewer feel involved for a second, it feels even more like watching your kid brother play one while you wait your turn.  It’s completely inconsequential and plastic to the point where it seems almost like a deliberate critique of the passive way in which we watch films made from an ostensibly active medium. But this is Resident Evil: Retribution we’re talking about here, not Michael Haneke; I’m certain any subtextual relevance is merely accidental.

What we’re left with is a cacophonous, tone-deaf mess with uniformly terrible acting, an indecipherable plot that no one seems to care about enough to straighten out and pointless slow-motion action scenes that usually end with something being tossed at the screen (being that the movie is, of course, in glorious, game-changing 3D). Someday this hunk of junk will inspire a great thesis paper, provided that someone out there is game to watch it at least twice. ■
 

Resident Evil: Retribution is in theatres.

Alex Rose blogs and podcasts about movies at Why Does it Exist? @whydoesitblog on Twitter.