Movie Review: ‘Resident Evil: Retribution’ (2012)

Director: Paul WS Anderson

Cast: Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Kevin Durand, Johann Urb, Sienna Guillory, Shawn Roberts, Li Bingbing, Aryana Engineer, Colin Salmon

Plot: Alice, captured by Umbrella, has to work her way through a series of test sites to meet up with a rescue team.

Review: The idea of underground labs as a gimmick seems to be something Anderson was keen to return to. We had previously seen the beginning of an outbreak in Shibuya Square, Tokyo, and we return to that event with the reveal that it was a clone-filled simulation built by the Umbrella marketing team to showcase their bioweapons.

It turns out that Umbrella has a whole string of these simulations built and ready to go — New York, Moscow, etc. After the attack on Arcadia set up at the end of the previous film, Alice is imprisoned in a complex connecting them all and has to fight through each set piece. We get something of a video-game-themed level progression. As a gimmick, it makes for a varied action adventure.

This isn’t a movie to rest on one gimmick, though.

In addition to the famous-landmarks staging, we’re getting a huge influx of new video-game characters. The Redfields didn’t get a look-in this time; instead, we get fan favourites Ada Wong (Bingbing), Barry Burton (Durand), and Leon Kennedy (Urb — a man with a remarkable jawline that would make all the looksmaxers jealous). None of them act much like their characters, to my understanding, but they wear the little outfits and shoot lots of guns.

Strap in for the third gimmick, though… We also see the return of characters from as far back as the first film in the series. Michelle Rodriguez takes on dual roles as a superhuman version of her merc character and an anti-gun suburban mother. There’s a host of familiar faces now playing the enemy as Alice and her team of game characters fight their way through the catalogue of past monsters.

Amid all these gimmicks, we almost forgot that Alice somewhat adopts a child. One of the simulations is a suburb where an Alice clone in Bryce Dallas Howard’s old wig has a deaf child. The clone gets killed, and the kid attaches herself to Alice, who is too awkward to explain things. This mostly leads into Anderson’s preoccupation with making Aliens (he took a break last movie to make The Matrix), and does the entire third-act rescue from a cocoon.

It’s a non-stop deluge of mad action… but it’s also pretty boring. There are a couple of creative moments. The massive attack on Arcadia that begins the movie plays out in reverse slow motion, so that’s a memorable moment that almost threatens to then play out forwards as well. There’s a whole ensemble of great character actors, even if they don’t all get used as well as they should be. Unfortunately, Anderson never seems to know how to mask flaws in effects and CGI. At times, he never seems to have enough coverage while simultaneously including twice as many edits as necessary.

This is the penultimate chapter, and it feels as though it is running out of steam. Hopefully, we get something bombastic for the finale. Ending this one with all the remaining characters teaming up for an epic showdown against the zombie horde on the roof of the White House — that only bodes well.

Rating: FOUR out of TEN