Good, Bad & Ugly Review: Resident Evil – Retribution



Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 29% (Critics) / 62% (Audience)
Directed By: Paul W.S. Anderson
Written By: Paul W.S. Anderson
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Boris Kodjoe and Michelle Rodriguez
Studio: Screen Gems

Synopsis: Alice fights alongside a resistance movement in the continuing battle against the Umbrella Corporation and the undead.
(Source)

The Good:
There was not much good abut this movie…I was impressed by one scene that looked like a gigantic futuristic dry cleaners with clones on carousels instead of clothes.
And Bingbing Li as Ada Wong looked she stepped right out of my copy of the Resident Evil 2 video game.

The Bad:
Paul W.S. Anderson is a really bad director but I think he is probably even worse as a writer. This movie’s storyline was just plain old dumb and basically amounted to running, shooting and karate. And those action scenes were really uninspired. It was like Anderson directed all of his actors to strike “cool” poses and shoot their guns which he then would film in slow motion for even more of a supposedly cool visual. Maybe it was cool once or twice but by the 50th time that it happened it just became laughable.
Milla Jovavich also seems to be just phoning it in as Alice now. She has begun tro emote almost as little as the woodenly comatose Shawn Roberts does as her arch-nemesis Wesker.

The Ugly:
One of the least appealing aspects about the first movie was the Red Queen artificial intelligence that was running the Umbrella Corp.. well the character was back for this film and it was as reliably horrible a move as I thought it would be. It was like having an even more annoying Veruca Salt yelling petulant threats ad nauseum.

Final Verdict: This franchise needs to die and let someone besides Paul W.S. Anderson reboot it with the goal being to stick closer to the video game source material instead of creating a bastardized version of a good concept as a way to keep his actress wife working. Just a wretched film all around. Its not even fun in a bad way, its just bad in the worst way possible.

Grade: D-

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