How bad can something be before it starts to become funny?
This is the question writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson has been asking his
whole career, and finally, after five movies in this tired video-game inspired
franchise, I think I’m starting to get the joke. Like an episode of Family Guy proves, sometimes
a lame gag repeated ad nauseum can eventually accumulate hilarity, not because
it was ever funny, but because of the absurdity of how hard they are trying to
sell it. This is “Resident Evil:
Retribution”.
As with
all of the other movies by this director, who has spent the majority of his
career ruining established properties like “Mortal Kombat”, “Alien vs.
Predator” and “Death Race”, “Resident Evil: Retribution” is as over-designed, messy, action B-movie, with pretty much no
coherent plot to be found. Actually, unlike his other Resident Evil’s, this one
commits more fully to the video-game structure, in that every scene is a goal
or task oriented set-piece, with a boss battle at the end of it. Along the way,
our hero Alice, played by Anderson’s long-time wife and collaborator Mila
Jovovich, has to pick up different achievements and upgrades, whilst protecting
her team and her clone daughter.
So
what’s the ‘story’ you might ask? I have not the slightest clue. The movie begins with a big war scene (shot
in reverse and then back forward, for some unknown reason) between Alice and
the evil Umbrella Corporation, who have been trying to unleash a zombie/monster
virus on the world since the first installment back in 2002. Suddenly, Alice
wakes up as a happy house mom with a kid and husband…until they are attacked by
zombies with tentacles coming out of their mouths. We then find out, through a
lot of clunky exposition, that she is actually entrapped in a big simulated
city, where Umbrella plans to test zombie outbreaks on millions of clones. Is
Alice a clone herself? We don’t ever find out and we don’t really care. Instead
we get a series of digital-looking action scenes as she and her team of one
dimensional sidekicks have to shoot their way through the phony city.
Everything
about this movie is consistently bad; the hammy acting by its C-list cast, the
showy action shots—done with that obligatory post-Wachowski, sub-Snyder,
slow-motion moving camera--and its attention seeking, poke-you-in-the-eye 3D. Every single element
is a sigh and groan until you realize that everything is also consistently
cheesy, over the top, and *gasp* fun. By abandoning plot and character
development completely, Anderson has now widdled this franchise down to his
bare fanboy fetishes, resulting in the type of bad movie that invites you to
mock it along the way. This movie is so unnecessary and so lazy that it feels
like a parody of a Paul Anderson film, and if that were actually the case then
this would be something of a satirical masterpiece. However, as it stands, this is still just a
stupid action movie made for people who are only interested in receiving the
bare-minimum of their genre expectations and the comfort of brand recognition.
So,
what can I say? Should you see this movie? I don’t know. If you have seen all
the others and you liked them, then I doubt you would suddenly find fault in
this mess. If you have never been a fan or you don’t have the stomach for heavy
loads of cheese, then you better stay away. However, if you can shift your
perspective and appreciate the movie for all its awkward and outrageous camp,
than maybe you can enjoy “Resident Evil: Retribution”. It’s not boring, and better yet, it’s only 90
minutes long.
Grade: C-
Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Oct-2012
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