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| Worth noting: this is one of the best taglines I have ever seen. |
Writer: Paul W.S. Anderson
Cast: Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Michelle Rodriguez, Aryana Engineer, Bingbing Li, Boris Kodjoe, Johann Urb, Oded Fehr, Shawn Roberts
Runtime: 96 mins.
2012
I actually... kind of like this one? Lest you think it anything but utter trash, I should point out that the number of dead characters who make an appearance in this movie is at least four. Five if you count the big ax guy (there are two this time). This is indeed a Paul W.S. Anderson movie through and through, sense be damned. But it might be good despite itself? Then again, I have probably developed Stockholm syndrome after being held captive by my resolve to review the entirety of this miserable franchise.
The film opens with Alice (Milla Jovovich) floating up through the water. In time, we realize that we are seeing the aftermath of the final shot of the previous film, in which a brainwashed Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) leads a fleet of battlecopters to destroy Alice and the other survivors. Except it's reversed and in slow motion. This is a neat little visual feast to kick off the proceedings. Pointless, perhaps, and ruined by Anderson's insistence on watching it in forward motion immediately afterwards, but ingratiating nonetheless. It's a neat way to slip us back into the series' gonzo mentality.
Of course, Anderson sees fit to put one of his garish recaps in between the backwards and forward scenes, but we were remaining positive, were we not?
Once that is finished, the narrative takes a turn. Alice wakes up in a quiet suburban home, a bit confused but otherwise lacking memories of her participation in a critically reviled action franchise. She finds herself married to Todd (Oded Fehr, previously known as Carlos), and mother to a little girl named Becky (Aryanna Engineer, a superb name). As distant screams and sirens erupt, we realize that this is it: the day the apocalypse began. Alice frantically tries to protect her daughter as the neighborhood descends into chaos, and grotesque creatures assault her family.
As I see it, this sequence is Anderson's apology for the baffling choice of never giving us a proper virus outbreak scene several movies ago. It also stands out as a surprisingly functional setpiece. A rare vulnerable version of Alice, though one that still displays the same steely resolve, is put through her paces. Even more so than the parade of familiar faces, we are invested in this sequence because for once we actually care about these characters.
That has a lot to do with Becky. Presumably hearing impaired, Becky communicates with her mother partially through sign language. Watching Jovovich treat her differently abled child with love and gentleness is schmaltzy to the core, but it is an oasis of humanity in a franchise of desolate faceless extras. The work Jovovich does here is surprisingly effective, and it makes one wonder what could have been if Jovovich had been given any decent material to work with throughout the series. Becky comes back later in the film and we get to see her interact with the more bloodthirsty version of Alice that we know so well. It provides a surprising level of depth to a character that previously, deliberately, had none. I would go so far as to say that Alice and Becky's relationship is the only relationship to actually work in this entire woebegotten franchise, and it goes a long way towards lending Retribution some much needed gravity.
But Anderson's bag of tricks is not empty yet. Once that scene has run its course, Alice wakes up (you guessed it--naked) in a garish hyperfluorescent Umbrella Corporation torture chamber. She is tortured at the hands of a borderline robotic Jill Valentine, looking down from above. This proceeds for quite some time until, mysteriously, the system shuts down and the chamber doors open. From there Alice wanders through a series of corridors until she finds herself seemingly in the middle of downtown Tokyo, ground zero of the zombie apocalypse once more. It's an eerie, tantalizing sequence that legitimately builds a certain amount of curious tension. As a bonus, it ends with perhaps the single best choreographed fight scene in the series: a hallway fight in which Alice must fend off a couple dozen zombies armed with only a single pistol and a bike chain.
So that's it. The first thirty or forty minutes of this movie are actually pretty good and super fun to watch. It takes an inevitable dive in quality coincident with the appearance of the aggressively dull Ada Wong (Bingbing Li), a lean mean exposition-spitting machine. The whole enterprise gets worse and worse as it goes, but it's still never as sloppy as its predecessors. The silly clones-and-simulations nature of the plot lets us take a fun tour through a bunch of major cities. Anderson's bizarre brain pumps out enough setpieces that are more engaging than tiresome. I seem to remember a car chase involving Nazi zombies with bazookas, or something to that effect. Someone gets punched in the heart to death, too.
As a total package, it's mixed but positive. The stakes are clear-ish. The camerawork is clear-ish. The character work is... well, it exists, which is a first for Resident Evil. In fact, this whole film displays a basic competency that comes out of nowhere for Anderson. This one is a much-needed win.
2.5 / 5 BLOBS
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