There Will Be Retribution

Last night, I was persuaded to go with some fans of the Resident Evil franchise to go see the newest incarnation, Retribution. (My boyfriend was leading the charge, which definitely turned the tide. He had been really excited for the movie since seeing the first preview.)

I've seen only one other of the five (are there five now, right?) Resident Evil movies, and have only the most threadbare memories of it. Describing those dim memories to another, different Resident Evil fan over lunch at work, he told me it was the second installment, Apocalypse, that I'd seen. "The worst one," he called it. (And my boyfriend later confirmed.)

Well once again, I've managed to see "the worst one." I left the theater with my small group of fans proclaiming this was the worst of the lot by far. It was such an assault on the senses, so amplified by the screaming 3D IMAX sound system, that one of my friends proclaimed she felt she'd been "ear and eye raped."

I think maybe the one good thing I can say about the movie was that they were being thoughtful of the folks like me in the audience who hadn't seen every film in the series. After a truly bizarre opening credits scene that played in reverse under the opening credits, things segued to a three-minute long sequence that basically amounted to "previously on Resident Evil." Not that it really mattered. She fights zombies. Everybody got that?

What followed was like watching somebody else play a video game, a video game that was rushed through a couple key stages of development to release about four months sooner than it should have been.

Many action movies feel clumsy in the way they stitch "set pieces" of action together, the way they illogically transition from, say, a car chase to a boat race. This movie felt even one step worse, as though it were "levels" being stitched together. Each segment seemed to open with an exposition statement of the goal that was about to be pursued -- sometimes restated more than once. And when the movie reached the end of the segment, you could almost visualize the Score Summary screen left on the cutting room floor.

The acting is terrible. Milla Jovovich is the only one who feels anywhere close to natural, and the machine-like, badass nature of her character really isn't leaving her much room to maneuver either. Everyone else in the cast once again contributes to that feeling of watching a badly made video game more than a movie. Every piece of dialogue feels like it was recorded one line at a time, probably not in order, probably in one take, and probably guided by a director not really used to working with actors. The performances are stilted and awkward from top to bottom, but two actors really deserve to be singled out as especially awful -- Sienna Guillory as Jill Valentine and Li Bingbing as Ada Wong, who radiate "I'm the video game villain" and "I'm the video game companion," respectively, with every word they speak. It hurts.

I don't like it when horror movies substitute cheap "loud noises" scares for genuine suspense. Retribution is only capable of making you jump; it's not scary at all. The creature design is incredibly limited. More interesting "regular zombies" have been shown on The Walking Dead (in almost every episode), and there are only two other kinds of creatures shown in the movie -- again and again and again -- managing to bore you long before the end credits, even in a movie that's only 95 minutes long.

There's one moderately well-done fight sequence early on, in which Jovovich's character takes on about two dozen zombies all by herself. It does at least have some interesting fight choreography, even if it is preposterous. But the rest is all loud and dumb, punctuated by stupid one-liner dialogue that wouldn't even be worthy of an 80s Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

And lest you think to yourself, "well, he wasn't going to like that movie anyway" (though you're probably right about that), let me conclude by again reminding you that all three of the Resident Evil fans I went with agreed with me. I was walking out of the theater, trying to figure out how to diplomatically explain that I didn't really like the movie, when they all just opened up full salvo and declared what a piece of crap we'd all just watched. So we all had a bonding experience, I guess, but one certainly not worth the steep movie admission price.

Resident Evil: Retribution is an unqualified F. Save your money, save your time. Don't wait for video. Just don't see it. Even if you're a Resident Evil fan.