Resident Evil - Retribution doesn't really do anything to try and lift this curse as it falls into the many traps and pitfalls that other horror franchises have done that have come before it.
The film follows Alice (Milla Jovovich) who is still being relentlessly stalked by the Umbrella Corporation and their deadly T-Virus. This time, she is being attacked by Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) who now works for Umbrella (after being an ally for Alice in earlier film, Resident Evil - Apocalypse). Alice is captured and being held in an underwater testing facility off the coast of Russia where Umbrella has created many scenarios to test the T-Virus to showcase it to many nations across the globe and start a new viral weaponry arms race. It's a ridiculously grandiose storyline for a film that largely takes place in an underground facility (much like the first film, back in 2002). This time, Alice is joined by Ada Wong (Bingbing Li), Leon S. Kennedy (Johann Urb) and Luther West (Boris Kodjoe), while she is also lumbered with a cloned daughter, Becky (Aryana Engineer) - no joke! However, Retribution isn't happy with just bringing in some new recognisable faces from the game series, it also reintroduces some old faces from the film series in the form of Rain (Michelle Rodriguez), Carlos (Oded Fehr) and James 'One' Shade (Colin Salmon) - the dude who gets diced up by the lasers in the first film.
So as you can see, Resident Evil - Retribution is a complete miss-mash of established film characters and well-known game characters and it's exactly what you'd expect from the fifth film in a series. The narrative is getting so complex by now that it's hard to remember who's who, who works for who, who is a clone and who is real. In fact, I'm still not really sure on the who's real and who's a clone.
But, despite having an overly complex character list, Retribution has no plot. Well, almost no plot.
The film takes it back to 2002, back to the original film, and creates a plot that is basically a copy of what we've had before. There's an underground/underwater facility, a timer/bombs which provides the countdown to when the characters have to be out by, a rescue mission to get someone out of the facility (it just happens to be Alice this time) and lots and lots of zombies and other 'biohazards'. While I liked this simplistic plot in the first film, for a fifth film it felt like a little bit of a cop-out. You'd expect something to happen to finally take down the Umbrella Corporation or to finally put a cap on the T-Virus, but no. Instead the characters take down a disused Umbrella testing facility that has already been used to spread the T-Virus across the globe. So, when the bombs finally go off at the end, it doesn't really do anything to the Corporation or the spread of the virus.
However, despite having problems with the basics, Director Paul W.S. Anderson sets out to prove that he is a Director who can still let his style shine through, despite being clouded by a dodgy script. For the first time since the first film, Retribution attempts to add some horror and suspense (mainly in the "Suburbia" testing scenario), where Alice and her clone daughter, Becky are creeping around into attics and wardrobes to hide from a zombie attack. He also knows how to stage a good (albeit slightly cheesy) action scene - particular highlights include Alice's first fight against the zombies from the Tokyo testing scenario where she kills a horde of zombies with just a pistol and a chain and the giant mutated Licker chase scene through the Russia testing scenario.
It's just a shame that his action direction isn't as strong as his writing skills, because Retribution features some of the worst dialogue I have seen in a long time. When Alice "argues" with Luther West about trying to save her clone daughter, Becky at the end of the film, I was cringing in my seat. I don't think Jovovich could have played the scene any more deadpan than she actually did. If it was just painful dialogue, then it would have been bearable, but unfortunately Anderson's weak script is also full of plot holes (more so than in your average Resident Evil flick, I would argue). The 'real' Alice somehow knows how to do sign language to her deaf clone daughter and clones manage to easily navigate their way through to different scenarios are just a couple. (The latter might not seem like a massive plot hole, but when you realise that the different testing scenarios were constantly full of those infected by the T-Virus in order to stage an outbreak, containing that outbreak was imperative.)
I could go on and on really, but it wouldn't be fair. Resident Evil - Retribution is what it is and I'm happy to sit back and say this. By now, you're either a fan of the Resident Evil films, think they are utter tripe or haven't seen a single one of them. To be fair to Retribution, it does pick up some of the slack left behind by the boring Afterlife that came before it, but there's no denying that the Resident Evil series by now is lacking some bite.
**½ / *****
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