You know the old cliche, “Be careful what you wish for?” It’s true. Back in my 17 year old adolescence I filled my time with video games. My friends (I had 2 at the time) and I would geek out and wish that Hollywood would catch on to how cool video games were and adapt them. I foolishly thought of how great movies of Final Fantasy, Resident Evil and Silent Hill would be. Oh, poor sad 17 year old Kenny. If you only knew.
You may be surprised to hear that Resident Evil: Retribution is the 5th installment of the “popular” zombie film series. Yeah, you read that right! I bet 85% didn’t know how far this has gone. In fact, if someone could name each subtitle of the sequels, I would be a little afraid and possibly dry heave a bit.
Let me catch you guys up on the history of the Resident Evil franchise. Keep in mind, my memory is shady on the first 3 movies and I never saw the last one.
It all started in a labratory of the Umbrella Corporation. A vial carrying a new chemical called the T-virus broke and the entire building went on lockdown. And by building, I mean high security military complex. A team of specialists, including the worst actress ever Michelle Rodriguez, go in for some reason, possibly looking for survivors. They are joined by Alice (Milla Jojovich) who survived the outbreak. Basically the team is eaten by zombie dogs, demon lickers, and zombies. Finally Michelle Rodriguez dies and Alice escapes, while some dude is taken by Umbrella and experimented on.
From there, Alice discovers that the entire population of….wait for it….Raccoon City is infected. She has to gang up with another rag-tag group of survivors and outlive every single one of them. She eventually has to fight the Nemesis (that dude who was experimented on). In the third you realize most of the world is infected and major cities are abandoned. She fights some zombies in the desert and more people die. I didn’t watch the last one, but it incorporated actual characters from the games, Chris and Claire Redfield. Apparently Alice has been cloned, and every one of her clones is a butt-kicking superchick. I’m sure more people die except for her. And that bring us to Resident Evil: Retribution.
Now Alice wakes up in an underwater Umbrella facility and the evil corporation has kept her there for interrogation. Seems a little extreme, but hey, this is the Resident Evil franchise. Things aren’t looking too good for her until she is rescued by several of the characters from the game series. They literally have to beat certain levels until they can escape. Each level is based off a major city or suburb. If they’re going to make it seem like I’m playing the game at least put a controller in my hands.
Michelle Rodriguez is back due to the clone plot fix. Every time one of her iterations was on screen I hoped for her death soon. Thankfully, it delivered on that. The acting is so so so bad in this movie. Let’s put it this way, everyone else in the cast made Milla Jojovich look like a trained Shakespearean actor. The other problem with the video game cast, there was no creativity in the costume design. They basically said, “Oh, that guy wears a red vest in the game? He’s going to wear that so people know who he is.” Don’t get me started on the red dress that apparently is great for combat
 |
| Still less painful than watching RE: Retribution… |
Is this movie so bad it’s good? No. Instead of going for camp, it uses its budget on larger than life action scenes. The only problem with that is that they get bad actors with bad delivery. And even the action scenes felt as lifeless as the Transformers series. I did laugh AT this movie but that doesn’t mean I can recommend it to anyone else. If you are still thinking about dropping 9 bucks to see this, just know that it only sets up the next sequel or two. And with the way things are going, it’s only getting worse from here. Don’t see this one.
And if I haven’t convinced you yet, I have 4 words for you –
Russian. Zombies. Riding. Motorcycles.
