Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Writer: Paul W.S. Anderson
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Iain Glen, Ali Larter, Shawn Roberts, Eoin Macken, Fraser James, Ruby Rose, William Levy, Rola, Ever Anderson
Runtime: 106 mins.
2017
So soon into 2017 and already we have a veritable lock for worst movie of the year. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter makes me furious. Not just because it's bad. All these movies are bad. Rather, the specific way in which it is bad feels like a slap in the face, especially as this is the only movie in the franchise that I had the misfortune of paying for a movie ticket to see.
First off, the Resident Evil movies have always had a bad habit of letting important storytelling moments happen offscreen between movies, but The Final Chapter takes this trend to unacceptable levels. Up until this point, the continuity of these films has been lazy and nonsensical, but in a twisted sense consistent. For whatever reason, Anderson suddenly decides to jettison all that.
The previous film ends with (spoiler alert) Alice being brought to the nation's capital to team up with Wesker (Shawn Roberts). She brings Becky (her surrogate daughter), the gun for hire Ada Wong, and a newly reformed Jill Valentine. Once she arrives, Wesker gives her back her powers and tells her that he has use for her--she is the only one who can combat the infected hoards that threaten the last pockets of humanity. Pan out to various monstrosities laying siege to (if memory serves) the Lincoln Memorial building. Or maybe it's the White House.
That's a legitimately cool set-up, and it felt like the plot was escalating appropriately towards its final installment.
Then The Final Chapter begins. DC is a desolate wasteland with a monster here or there, Alice wakes up alone, her friends and daughter are never spoken of, and we never find out what happened. Instead all we get is some tossed out, oblique reference to DC being a trap for Alice set up by Wesker (why?), and an assertion that he "pretended" to give her her powers back. For the first time in the franchise, it seems like Anderson's heart just isn't in it.
That laziness is indicative throughout. Rather than introduce new characters to fill new roles in the plot, Anderson simply brings back long dead folks to plug in where needed, apparently because the actors worked out fine before so why not. The most egregious example of this is Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen), whose presence in this movie is explained away with the most pathetic wink and nod imaginable. This is more or less the dialogue exchange between him and Alice:
Alice - "I thought I killed you."
Isaacs - "You killed my clone."
Alice - "I thought I killed your clone too."
Isaacs - *shrugs*
Sure, the clone thing is by now a longstanding Resident Evil plot contrivance, but even worse is the matter of fact reveal that Isaacs is one of the co-owners of the Umbrella Corporation, even though he was clearly just a scientist and subordinate to Wesker in the third movie. Now, since it's convenient, Anderson writes that Isaacs has always been in charge. Not to mention that the other co-owner was apparently the father to the little girl-turned-murderous AI known as the Red Queen, even though I'm pretty sure she had an entirely different father in the second movie? Not to mention that the Red Queen helps Alice in this film despite explicitly wanting to wipe out humanity in the previous one. Also, learning that Isaacs started the apocalypse because he's obsessed with the Noah's Ark story... well, I'm pretty sure it contradicts everything we were to believe about the Umbrella Corporation's behavior from the first five movies. Also, Isaacs's entire arc in the third film is based around him feverishly seeking a cure for the virus; to recap, that means a scientist was trying to invent a cure he already had for an infection that he himself started.
All that may sound nitpicky, but I put a lot of goddamn time into trying to enjoy these half-assed slipshod narratives, and to have the culminating chapter blatantly disregard everything that came before it feels like a betrayal.
There are a few isolated moments here and there that skirt on being redeemable. Ruby Rose plays a character who briefly stands out as likable before being chopped up by a big fan. The assertion that there are only a few hundred people left alive in the world, although used to nonsensically and artificially raise the stakes, is a chilling prospect. And there's a silly turn near the end in which Alice gets to play against herself in a scene, but an old wise version of herself. The aging make-up is halfway decent, and as always Jovovich makes it far more entertaining than it has any right to be, proving yet again that she is the shining light embedded in a franchise of infinite dreck.
Yet I found it impossible to remotely enjoy any of those glimmers of entertainment due to the film's crippling flaw: it contains the worst editing I have ever seen in a big budget movie.
After the relatively crisp style of Retribution, Anderson opts here to overhaul that aesthetic in favor of quick cuts and shakycam. It's worth pointing out that this style is often employed by action directors who are being, again, lazy about the whole enterprise, and just want to shoot a bunch of coverage that the editor can cobble together into something vaguely sensible. But the editing in The Final Chapter is not vaguely sensible. Oh, no. I would go so far as to call it impressionistic, because it aggressively impedes any basic understanding of what is happening onscreen. Even the action setpieces that qualify as conceptually cool, and (who knows?) maybe well-staged, are utterly ruined by the savage edits.
We could, and should, blame Anderson for the atrocious way this movie moves. Let's leave second unit director Vern Nobles out of the witch hunt, as he served the same role in Retribution. I am, however, entirely willing to crucify the editor Doobie White. He replaces the previous film's editor, Niven Howie, who has had a decent career including award winning work on Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. White, however, has no accolades and little experience. What he does have is a painful lack of talent.
I am not exaggerating when I say that my perception could not keep up with the onscreen action. Rather than engage with the movie, I was left to stew vacantly in my own anger. The Final Chapter is a movie that stops just short of begging you to despise it. Perhaps the creators are even aware of this, as none other than Milla Jovovich and Paul W.S. Anderson himself popped up in a pre-film clip thanking us so much for being such good fans over the years. He seemed to be pleading with us to enjoy the movie, a plea that I could not fulfill even had I wanted to.
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