Movie Review: Resident Evil The Final Chapter

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter [2016]

[Disclaimer: these reviews were written in 2019 alongside a batch of the first three movies reviews, but I decided not to publish them in 2020 due to reasons, and these were pushed... way back]

And so it ends with a whimper, not a bang. Y'know, I've always thought that the second 'trilogy' of movies were a bit better in that they embraced the over-the-top ridiculous silliness that the franchise can be, but I must only have Retribution and Afterlife in mind. The Final Chapter is... honestly, a bit of a huge slog to watch through in that it jumps around so much. Not just the many moments where Alice gets knocked out and had fragmented images running through her mind in the first third of the movie, but this one suffers from a simple lack of focus. 

The concept of the movie itself is simple -- a final stand; Alice against Umbrella for the cure that will wipe out all the zombies on a post-apocalyptic earth. That's an all right concept for a final chapter in this movie franchise. Hell, even bringing things back to the Hive in Raccoon City, the location of the first movie, is pretty interesting, and I'm even a huge fan of bringing back Extinction's Alexander Isaacs (Iain Glen) to serve as the 'final villain', so to speak, sharing the stage with Albert Wesker. We get two of the movies' best villains teaming up together, and the Red Queen is always welcome as an unsettling part of the movie. Best of all, Red Queen's even playing a fun trope in combining 'unsettling child' with 'artificial intelligence doing interesting things while following her programming'. Some of the revelations, while they feel like ass-pulls created just for this movie, is even somewhat consistent with what we know about the movie universe. Things like the Alexander Isaacs that got zombified and killed in Extinction being a clone, or that Umbrella planned all this zombie apocalypse while most of their 'chosen' hid out in safety underground, or that Isaacs somehow outranks Wesker... not very sensible, but I can roll with it. Even all the revelations around Alice's backstory and why Umbrella is so dead-set on her is one that I can sort of get behind. Plot holes and retcons can be 'revelations' if framed right. Unfortunately, none of these are. 

What I can't get behind, though, is how the movie actually delivers this information to us.

Let's start with the beginning of the movie, shall we? Y'know, this movie has a franchise of having cliffhangers that they don't deliver on. Apocalypse ends with Alice, Carlos and company escaping on a van? Nope, next movie opens with the entire world dead. Extinction ends with an Alice clone army being born? Well, Afterlife at least does something fun with it for fifteen minutes. Afterlife ends with a huge helicopter Umbrella army about to blow up Arcadia? Again, Retribution does something fun with it for its opening credits roll. Retribution's end is actually a pretty fun cliffhanger that I remembered being excited for. Alice, Wesker, Jill, Ada and Leon all standing on the White House, against a horde of bioweapons and zombies, as humanity's last stand?

This movie doesn't even try and pretend to have anything to do with that cliffhanger other than 'welp, something happened, they all lost, Wesker betrayed them lol'. At least Alice doesn't get her story-breaking powers back, but the rest of this movie is honestly so bland that I kind of wished that she had. The real reason was probably that they couldn't get any of the other actors back, but at the very least some showcase of Wesker betraying Alice in the zombie horde would've made the first act of the movie not the dreary slog that it was. 

Because the first act of the movie was a dreary slog. Sure, the information about James Marcus trying to save her little girl, the first outbreak of the T-Virus, and establishing Isaacs and Wesker's backstory in the time before the movies? Okay, sure. But then Alice wakes up, fights the giant butterfly monster from Resident Evil 5 for quite a while, and then just sort of gets contacted by the Red Queen, who gives her the mission to infiltrate the Hive, steal the anti-virus they have just conveniently created, and that Umbrella is trying to wipe out humanity. 

And then we just have dreary dusty post-apocalyptic world, slogging on and on with Alice just getting knocked out and captured by an Umbrella convoy led by "Isaacs" (actually a clone), who just refuses to kill Alice for some reason and instead engages in a game of 'have her run tied to a rope behind our armoured convoy while we lead a zombie horde to the last human settlement in Raccoon City. It would've been a far more fun image if they actually tried to play up how absurd this is, but after a short action scene later, we get Alice... knocked out by the final group of survivors. It's like a repeat of the Walking Dead ripoff scene from Extinction and Afterlife where we have this 'survivors band together' sequence, except that I literally care for no one in this movie's human survivors. It's just Alice and Claire, and... everyone else there is literally interchangeable, none of them are really interesting enough for me to care for them. Sure, there's a mole there, but, again, there's nothing there that's really interesting. 

The action scene that happens next... we did get a fun martial arts sequence between Alice and Commander Chu, and the huge spectacle scene of Alice and company dropping ridiculously explosive and flammable oil down on the zombie horde and lighting a skyscraper on fire is over-the-top implausible but visually cool. But the rest of it is so dark and shadowy and so hard to tell what's going on... not that I really do care because, again, I don't care for anyone there other than Alice, Claire and Isaacs. 

Then we have the Umbrella infiltration sequence with a series of traps, which are ridiculous even by Resident Evil standards. Like that corridor that just has enough folding panels to drop one dude into a chute to nowhere, drop Alice into the slaughterhouse, and drop Claire into a glass box? Again, the pacing at this sequence was so, so slow. Sure, there's that brief action sequence against the Cerberus and the Bloodshot monsters, but those were so short and, again, shot in such dark, shadowy places and ended so abruptly that it's hard to care. (Really, the butterfly monster sequence probably should've happened here, too). 

We're nearly an hour into the movie and see a bunch of people whose names I don't remember get killed by turbine traps, zombie dogs and finger-slicing chutes until we actually get to the story that the movie really wants to tell, and we get the long exposition that Alexander Isaacs and the rest of Umbrella's high command has basically cryogenically frozen a bunch of people under the ground; that Alice is a clone of Alicia Marcus, dead daughter of Umbrella's co-founder James Marcus; that the Red Queen is a digital clone of young Alicia Marcus; and that, apparently, the real Alexander Isaacs and Alicia Marcus are just chilling in cryo-pods. And somehow, there's this utterly bizarre sub-plot where Isaacs and Marcus are arguing over... shareholders or something? What? In a post-apocalyptic world, and one where Wesker is clearly not loyal to anyone but Isaacs, I'm genuinely baffled that they even bothered waking up old Alicia Marcus instead of just letting her suffocate, or having Wesker shoot her or something. It's bizarre. 

Speaking of which, Wesker, who was established in previous movies to be superhuman, and also being able to have enough plot armour to survive bombs, helicopter crashes, point-blank shotgun shots to the head and apparently the White House zombie apocalypse... gets like half a leg trapped and somehow he's dying? At least give the courtesy to have half his body pinned there or something. 

We then get a very bland sub-plot of Claire's boyfriend being the Umbrella mole (which ended poorly for random boyfriend), Marcus 'fires' Wesker in the movie's best and most hilarious moment and allows Red Queen to smash half of Wesker flat... and we get an honestly pretty lackluster and extended fight against the real Alexander Isaacs, who has some cyborg Sherlock Holmes style "I can predict what you are going to do" ability. Which is... not particularly interesting. Alice eventually does a silly grenade trick with Isaacs in the laser corridor(tm), which is honestly just there just so the movie can go "hey, look the laser corridor, everyone reminds that about the awesome first movie, right?" Except the fight scenes in this sequence in particular just jump from one camera angle to the next so rapidly and it's just not fun at all to see. 

And then we get the confrontation between Alice, the real Isaacs, and the clone Isaacs from the first act. The two Isaacs kill each other, and Alice releases the anti-virus... which is also airborne and can also kill all the zombies in the world, apparently. Simultaneously Wesker dies, drops the dead man's switch and blows up the entirety of the Hive, killing Marcus and the hibernating Umbrella clients. And then Claire (who got out somehow?) sees Alice, and the Red Queen reveals that apparently the whole movie is a secret test of character to see if Alice would make the willing sacrifice... because... uh... fuck the rest of humanity if she fails, I guess?

Speaking of which, Alice was always a generic stoic badass action hero in these movies, but she always has something that makes me don't mind her. Extinction gave her a fair amount of cloning blues. Afterlife sort of kind of gave her survivor's guilt. Retribution gave her a daughter (who goes unmourned and unmentioned here). But despite learning that she's a clone, and of a woman whose disease is one of the first causes of the T-Virus... nope, Alice has absolutely zero reaction. Jovovich does her best, but when the script is as tepid as it is, I can't blame her for not really being able to bring out anything out of her character in this one. Again, I don't mind the concept of all these huge revelations that the entire Resident Evil zombie apocalypse saga revolves around Alice... except it's not delivered well at all and Alice herself barely reacts to any of this. 

And that's it. That's honestly a pretty terrible movie to go out on. All five of the movies have given me something to enjoy -- some more than the others, but The Final Chapter is just a huge, huge mess. The sad part is, I could've seen a fun movie if they had a bit more of a solid writing and editing team. On the hands of a good team, the story here around Alice would've been poignant and dramatic. Instead it's just pointless stalling and gruesome deaths around a bunch of huge revelations that they never really do anything with. 

Random Notes:

• The lack of closure with any of the characters bar Alice and Isaacs is particularly jarring. Claire is brought back just for a pointless 'oh no my boyfriend is evil' subplot and really does jack-all throughout the movie. Wesker gets reduced to doing nothing and standing cool and dying like a bitch. Not even a single mention of Chris Redfield. Not even a vague 'Jill, Ada and Leon died'.
• So I never really quite understood why Alexander Isaacs would adopt Alicia Marcus, who not only witnessed her father's death, but also in her older age also vehemently opposed Isaacs. Even if he didn't kill her pre-zombie-outbreak, wouldn't he have done so after Extinction?
• Even more egregious is the lack of mention of Becky, the surrogate daughter Alice risked her entire life for in Retribution and the source of some much-needed characterization for Alice. Nope, not even mentioned at all. 
• Speaking of which, considering that Wesker's plan was to kill Alice and the survivors, the bizarre 'gambit' presented here that he imprisoned Alice in that underwater base and staged an elaborate rescue mission throughout Retribution just made that whole movie a bizarre, pointless distraction in terms of an Umbrella ploy. Which is a shame, because Retribution is one of the more entertaining movies. 
• Speaking of dumb Wesker things, in this movie he could definitely have killed the entire team in the giant fan of doom, but he shuts that off after killing Batwoman (also, hey, Ruby Rose is in this movie!) because... uh... reasons?
• Also stupidity in this movie is the Umbrella road ambush. Which worked for some reason despite this being a world with 4000 humans left, but also because despite catching Alice in their trap, they play pinata with her instead of shooting her in the head. 
• Also also Isaacs clone had like three different opportunities of killing Alice in that armoured vehicle. 
• Also also also, they just literally left that huge door to the Hive open. Despite the fact that Wesker and Red Queen clearly is able to shut it remotely. 
• How the hell did Wesker survive the massive bioweapon attack in the White House, and not made sure Alice had also died? T-virus enhancements and mutant powers, probably, but it's not like he uses that at all in this movie, and I completely forgot that this Wesker is supposed to have it. 
• Isaacs outranking Wesker is one of the less bizarre retcons, but I still have to point it out. Isaacs was really just treated as just some high-ranking scientist in a facility in Apocalypse and Extinction, and clearly Wesker was calling the shots there. And Wesker is basically stated to be chairman in Extinction and Afterlife... so yeah. 
• The Red Queen can't kill Umbrella employees... forgetting that her very first appearance has her kill an entire facility of Umbrella employees. Oy. 
• Isaacs, being a cybernetically enhanced superhuman, couldn't kill Alicia Marcus, a woman on a wheelchair? Also, with his super-speed, he could've had stolen the dead man's switch from Wesker. Or, later on in the movie, killed the clearly-crazy Clone Isaacs with his super-speed. 
• Umbrella being behind all of this all along makes absolutely less sense when you realize that the nuclear bombing of Raccoon City was engineered by Umbrella in Apocalypse as a cover-up... a cover-up that would've wiped out their entire population of 'high command' hidden underneath Raccoon City. 
• There was a lot more cryogenically-stored humans in the Hive than what you would expect for "Umbrella High Command"... this either means that they had a lot more civilians or their families with them down there. 
• A simple edit of someone revealing that they are clones would probably make it less of an unintentionally brutal move for Alice to kill all of them.
• Praising a cool thing of the movie? The Red Queen is 100% on fire in her snarking at Wesker and Isaacs throughout the movie. "You're all going to die down here" for real!