Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

Waiting for a Written Invitation?

Why would someone feel so compelled to watch 5 movies in a series that was never really that good to begin with?  I don’t have an answer to that question.  I do know the person that would do such a thing: me.  Every time this series releases a new movie, I feel like there’s no way I’m going to watch it.  I let it get all the way through the theaters too.  But when it comes to DVD, I always check it out.  There’s no excuse for my actions.  I’m contributing to this.  It’s like I’m watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians or the Jersey Shore or something.  But I can’t help myself.  And so you will be dragged into my psychosis as I review Resident Evil: Retribution, written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, and starring Milla Jovovich, Li Bingbing, Shawn Roberts, Sienna Guillory, Aryana Engineer, Johann Urb, Kevin Durand, Boris Kodjoe, Michelle Rodriguez, Oded Fehr, Colin Salmon, Megan Charpentier, and Mika Nakashima.

Alice (Milla Jovovich) is a normal housewife that lives with her husband Todd (Oded Fehr) and their deaf daughter Becky (Aryana Engineer).  OR IS SHE?!?!  No, she’s actually a zombie killing machine.  Well, one of her is.  There’re a lot of clones in the Umbrella facility she wakes up in.  The real-ish one wakes up and is getting interrogated by Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), who has been brainwashed by Umbrella.  Alice escapes to find herself in a giant, underwater facility designed to test the zombies or some shit.  We spend the rest of the movie watching Alice escape this facility with the help of Ada Wong (Li Bingbing), Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb), Barry Burton (Kevin Durand), and Luther West (Boris Kodjoe), who have all been sent by Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), who is a good guy now, I guess.  The Red Queen (Megan Charpentier) is also back, and she uses clones of Alice’s original team – Rain Ocampo (Michelle Rodriguez), Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr), and James Shade (Colin Salmon) – to try to stop them.

This movie is exactly what you expect.  I think it was Jonah Ray on the Nerdist podcast that acknowledged that these movies are lower class cinema, but that he could not help but be excited that they were coming out.  I never get so far as to say that I’m excited for them to come out, but they are enjoyable in their stupid simplicity.  The same goes for this movie.  It’s definitely not a good movie, but it’s enjoyable if you just shut your brain down and watch.  That’s the way they’re meant to be watched; with an aneurism.  They don’t really seem to be trying too hard either.  First off, the story is really not much more than Alice trying to figure out how to get out of a facility.  And that facility is full of various landscapes representing different places in the world, so they’re going to act like Alice is spanning the globe on the poster for the movie even though she’s not leaving that one facility.  But don’t worry; if you forget that all these places are fake, everyone in the movie will need to remind Alice several thousand times.  But she’s pretty, so brains are really irrelevant.  The same kind of goes for the writers of this movie and their ability to pull off some sweet one-liners.  They all fell completely flat.  Alice hits some baddies with a, “Hey boys.  Bad idea,” when she blows a car up in their faces.  You’re not even trying now, guys.  Bad idea works if you blow up a light bulb in their face or something.  That situation demands more of a “Here’s your ride” line.  I’ll need to refer you to Batman & Robin for proper usage of horrible one-liners.  Then you miss out on another good opportunity after Leon proclaims, “We’re gonna be okay,” and you didn’t have the Red Queen pop up and say, “Activating ‘Famous Last Words’ Protocols.”  It also bummed me out that it seemed clear that this game was not made for fans of the Resident Evil games, or even gamers for that matter.  All gamers know about the concept of a weak spot.  And all Resident Evil fans remember that the way to beat brainwashed Jill was to shoot the giant red spider brooch in the center of her cleavage.  And it wasn’t just obvious because all gamers were probably staring at her sweet rack.  Well it took this killing machine lady about 15 minutes before someone else told her to shoot at the bull’s-eye between Jill’s tits.

The look and the action in the movie worked out pretty well throughout.  The first scene in the movie was interesting because they were basically playing the last scene of the previous movie in slow motion reverse.  And, for a while, I thought they were going to play the entire movie in reverse because it went on so long.  But the movie seemed completely aware of the fact that its story wasn’t going to support it, so it made sure it was decently full of action.  The hallway battle early on in the movie was pretty sweet, even though it didn’t really have anything to do with the story.  I didn’t really care though because I didn’t really care about the story.  That way, it’s perfectly fine to make your action scenes just a bit of jerkin’ off because it had been three minutes since something blow’d up.  When the executioners showed up later, I was a little bit thrown off over how much they were ripped off from Pyramid Head from Silent Hill, but I’m pretty sure I remember them from the game too, so I can’t really blame the movie for that.  I also realized that this movie had a total Star Trek thing going on because guys wearing masks were the red shirts of this thing.  Michelle Rodriguez and Oded Fehr would come out of battles unscathed because they had the sense to not cover their faces.

Most of the performances were entirely acceptable and not much more.  I thought it was cool that they got the original team from the first movie back for this one, but I also thought it got a little confusing that there were like 4 versions everyone.  The only thing I thought about Milla Jovovich is that her housewife character was fuckin’ stupid for throwing away her baseball bat after one use.  That shit still works.  Li Bingbing was also pretty good.  Her performance wasn’t anything special, but she looked good in that Ada Wong outfit.  I did have some problems with Sienna Guillory.  She definitely looked the part, and definitely had some sweet knockers, but she delivered her lines super robotic and paused in weird places.  I guess she could’ve decided that it was the way someone who was brainwashed would act, but I just felt like she decided to let her tits do the talkin’.

Resident Evil: Retribution is exactly what I’m sure everyone expects.  It’s a big, dumb action movie.  And it lives up to every bit of it.  It’s so huge in scale that it’s unsatisfied with the idea of having their movie appear as if it was filmed in only one global hemisphere.  And, even though the story was weak, the action was fun and frequent.  It will probably not be the last time I say it about the Resident Evil franchise, but you know what you’re getting and it always delivers.  I wouldn’t necessarily recommend you buy this, but it’s a fun rental.  Resident Evil: Retribution gets “I’m kinda enjoying myself” out of “I’ve heard that before.”

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Alien vs. Predator (2004)

We Have to Consider the Possibility That We Might Not Make it Out of Here.

After having watched far too many Alien and Predator related movies back to back, I think I figured out what probably got today’s movie started.  I wouldn’t personally have drawn any comparisons between those two movies myself were it not for today’s film until I rewatched Predator 2.  In that movie, you can see what is clearly a Xenomorph skull inside the Predator’s ship, implying that the Predator could defeat the Xenomorph.  Fanboys being what they are, the Predator fans probably started to rub that in the face of Alien fans, causing Alien fans to defend their preferred series.  Over time, it became very similar to the Star Wars/Star Trek debates, and studios decided that they needed to make two movies that answered the questions of the fans.  Either that or the studios wanted to make more money.  Either way, the movie came out, and later became the subject for my review of Alien vs. Predator, written by Shane Salerno, written and directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, and starring Sanaa Lathan, Lance Henriksen, Ian Whyte, Tom Woodruff Jr., Raoul Bova, Ewen Bremner, Colin Salmon, Tommy Flanagan, Joseph Rye, Agathe de La Boulaye, Carsten Norgaard, Liz May Brice, and Sam Troughton.

A mysterious heat signature shows up underneath the island of Bouvetøya, 1,000 miles north of Antarctica, attracting a lot of attention, most notably from Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen), head of Weyland Industries.  He hastily assembles a team of experts to go and investigate what appears to be a temple buried beneath the ice, and contracts Alexa Woods (Sanaa Lathan) to lead the expedition, against her better judgment.  When they arrive, they find that some airborne anomaly has burrowed a hole from the surface to the temple in less than a day, even though the technology to do that doesn’t exist as far as humans know.  They get down to the temple and quickly find that this temple is a training ground for the Predators, who have kept a Xenomorph queen on ice in the temple until she’s needed to produce eggs, which then produce facehuggers, which then produce Xenomorphs, which then battle the Predators.  And the humans are now caught in the middle of the fight.

I can’t remember it that well, but I feel like my biggest problem with this movie was the same that I had with the movie Freddie vs. Jason: the studio/writer is too afraid of fan feedback to make a decision about who would win the fight that is the entire basis of their movie.  Freddie vs. Jason refused to make the decision and Alien vs. Predator made the wrong one.  And by that I don’t mean that I had picked who I wanted to win and they didn’t.  I mean that they made the humans win, or at least the one human win.  That’s not how the word “versus” works!  I’m not a huge boxing fan, but I’m pretty sure the winner of the famous Ali vs. Foreman fight was not Steve from row three.  Make either the Alien or the Predator definitively win, or don’t bother making the movie.  The world wouldn’t have missed the movie that much either since it really wasn’t that good.  Not horrible, but not great either.  I’m sure most of us know – because of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups – that two great things can work great together, like chocolate and peanut butter.  But some of us (namely me) know that two great things can be horrible together, like chocolate chip cookies and peanut butter.  And yes, I know that from experience.  The story was weak and barely worth paying attention to.  It was mainly just there for the purposes of the setup and then completely forgotten about, just like Alexa’s rules.  I distinctly remember her first rule being that everyone stays together, but the whole problem stars because the group splits into two.  Later on, she even brings it up again.  I guess getting six people killed by forgetting your rule will make you remember it a little better.  They also take to something I’ve hated about movies like this for a long time: why the hell would you even bother bringing an expert when you have no intention of listening to them?  When the expert on ancient cultures tells you not to take the Predator’s guns out of the coffin, why are you going to not just ignore him, but look him right in the eyes as you disobey him and single-handedly get everyone killed?  I also don’t like the Predator working with the humans.  That’s entirely out of character.  The closest thing Predator’s do to work with humans is occasionally to not kill them.  I didn’t even like the entire premise of the movie.  I don’t think the Predators and the Xenomorphs are a good match for each other.  The Predators are skilled hunters and the Xenomorphs are just semi-dumb creatures (at least as they’re portrayed in this movie) that don’t win with cunning or power, just sheer numbers.  This movie is supposed to be a battle between two powerful creatures and it turns into more like the battle I had with the ant hill the other day.  Granted, the Xenomorphs did their damage, but it was more to the humans and only against the Predators with either surprise or numbers, which kind of takes away from the power of the Xenomorphs.  The only occasion where they seemed to show any intelligence was when they raptor-ed the guy in the hallway at one point, having one appear in front to distract him but then hitting him with two from either side.  I was surprised that he didn’t applaud the girl’s cleverness.

I didn’t find any of the performances to be anything special.  Sanaa Lathan was the de facto lead of the movie.  She performed alright, but I get the feeling like they were trying to mooch some of Ripley’s badass chick character, but never really managed to do it, even though this chick did do ridiculous things that should never have happened, like at the end of the movie when she saved the Predator from something really big that it was fighting.  Lance Henriksen was also in the movie, and he was solid in his performance, but it didn’t usually require much more out of him than coughing in the background of a scene.  I was also shocked to see that I had actually seen more than one movie with Ewen Bremner in the cast, the other being the Rundown.  I’ve probably seen more, but I hadn’t yet paid attention to him until I saw him in a role I liked, as with his character in the Rundown.

Alien vs. Predator is two great things that probably should have never been put together.  They didn’t make it a decent fight, they made a silly decision on the outcome to the battle, and they didn’t put very much of interest in the movie to make up for that.  They did much more to damage the two things they brought together than they did to help it along, and for that I say you should skip this movie.  It’s okay, but there’s so many things that would probably bother fans of either of those two creatures, and people that weren’t fans of either probably wouldn’t consider watching the movie anyway.  Alien vs. Predator gets “It’s a bomb.  Well, I hope it kills every fucking one of ’em!” out of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

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