“At last,” the lead character Alice narrates, “we thought we had survived the horror.” But no, I barely survived the horror that is this movie. Resident Evil: Retribution is the 5th entry in the Resident Evil film franchise.
As someone who is only familiar with the games, I wasn’t sure what to expect going in. What I got was regret and disappointment in myself. The film centers on Alice, a shoot-first-ask-questions-never lady played by Milla Jovovich, who’s thrust into trying to escape an underwater holding facility owned by the Umbrella Corporation (the corporation behind a zombie outbreak that now plagues the world).
Jovovich looks asleep the entire time she’s on the screen, as she delivers all five lines that the script requires her to speak. To escape, she must form an alliance with her former adversaries. But, surprise! Escape isn’t all that easy as she and a small strike team fight their way out of this aquatic penitentiary.
That’s the entire plot: her escaping prison. What took Loki a grand total of 10 minutes in The Avengers takes Alice 95 minutes. While that seems like a short runtime, the movie feels more like a three-hour ordeal.
While the acting is atrocious (I’m convinced Keanu Reeves has never acted as bad as the collection of actors in this movie), the real issue of this forgettable movie lies in the script and the directing. The plot of this movie is only about escaping a holding facility, no more. There may be a grand total of 100 words spoken in this movie, but that could be an exaggeration: I’m sure I’m rounding up.
On top of that, for a movie that is made for action spectacle, the action sequences are bland, boring and forgettable as the director Paul W. S. Anderson overuses slow motion shots, possibly to simply increase the run time of this travesty.
It also feels like the director watched nothing but Christopher Nolan films before making this movie. While doing so with your time is an activity I highly support, Anderson has ripped off many of Nolan’s movies, from shots that seem right out of the Dark Knight to certain parts of the soundtrack that sound like a deaf person trying to recreate the Inception score.
While I didn’t see the movie in 3D, I can’t imagine it would redeem this movie in any way. There seem to be specifically made scenes to utilize the technology, but I don’t understand what’s appealing about a slow motion bullet travelling at your spectacle-donned eyes.
This movie is boring, it’s certainly not scary, and at the end of the day it’s a loud mess that’s more forgettable than, well, I forget.
As my friend Eric so eloquently said after the movie finally ended, “I feel less intelligent after watching that movie.”
