Movie Review: Resident Evil - Retribution

Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

[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]

Otherwise known as 'the first Resident Evil movie I watched on the big screen'. It's been a while now and I could've sworn I watched Afterlife at some point before Retribution, but Retribution was definitely the first real part of this franchise that I jumped into... and hoo boy, what a strange feeling it was. And yet the movie basically handwaves all the backstory into a huge exposition near the beginning, then puts it on the backburner as Alice goes off to basically play around in an Aliens storyline? It's bizarre, honestly. I do think that the movie works as a standalone movie since, well, I enjoyed it the first time I watched it.

By the standards of this movie franchise, though... hoo boy, it sure is a weird one. 

The idea is a bit of an interesting one. We get a callback to all the previous movies, including the fact that Umbrella has access to super-sophisticated cloning facilities (which we saw in Extinction), that they can clone characters from previous movies (we get Resident Evil's Agent One and Rain; and Apocalypse/Extinction's Carlos Olivera), and they have mind-control device (Apocalypse's Jill Valentine, last seen in the previous movie's mid-credits sequence) and access to super-powerful bioweapons like the Lickers and Executioners. We get the return of the movie franchise's two biggest antagonists, Albert Wesker and the Red Queen, each trying to one-up the other in their whole plan for... world domination of this post-apocalyptic world or something. And yet it all takes a backseat to the story of Alice wandering around the impractically large underwater base that Umbrella has all this time. Honestly, at this point, I'm just taking the video game route of shrugging and accepting the ridiculousness of what it is. 

The last movie's huge cliffhanger gets quickly shown as Jill Valentine and her army of faceless Umbrella goons murder or capture everyone on board the Arcadia. Chris, Claire, K-Mart? Who cares about them, Alice is the main character, right? They're not the concern of this movie, and Alice just wakes up. The movie does a repeat of Extinction's fake-out cold open, by having 'an' Alice wake up. Turns out that this is a clone Alice in a regular suburban city, married to Carlos Todd with a deaf daughter called Becky. Then ZOMBIE ATTACK! The zombie attack scene was pretty well-shot and pretty fun, featuring yet another return of the flower-mouthed Majini zombies (honestly one of my favourite visuals in the live-action movies). After a brief encounter with Michelle Rodriguez's character Rain, this Alice fights against the zombified Todd and they both die in the process. Mind-fuck, right? Not really, no, it's pretty obvious what this is if you kind of stop to think about the kinds of sci-fi that this movie franchise likes to deal with. 

And it's not a terrible concept on its own, really, but at the same time there's a huge amount of 'why, though' niggling at the back of my head. The real Alice wakes up naked (of course) before being freed (of course) by a power outage. She finds herself in fake Tokyo, fighting against zombies including a pretty cool sequence with a chain weapon and... and this basically really is what we're here to tune into these movies for, yeah? Cool, over-the-top action sequences. Except that the movie makers still try to bring in the video game characters into the movie lore, which I feel like maybe they should just try and just... do their own thing if they want to?

Ada Wong is cool, though. Played by Li Bingbing and showing just how someone can pull off crazy kung fu stunts in that dress, she introduces herself as Alice's unlikely ally... and that she's also working for Albert Wesker, who survives and is also betraying Umbrella, which is taken over by the Red Queen? Okay, sure. Just... just accept that it happened off-screen somehow. Wesker's the lesser evil, I guess, and the Red Queen is now evil... because? Just because. We get the explanation that Alice is trapped in an underwater grand facility that contains fake versions of different capital cities, all populated by Umbrella-made clones in order to stage the outbreaks. Which, despite the world already in a post-apocalyptic state, the Red Queen still continues to do over and over. It's a cool visual, right? Also, Wesker needs Alice to be rescued for plot reasons because Alice is a walking MacGuffin.

Alice and Ada have to fight their way through video-game levels the fake cities to rendezvous with a team of human survivors led by Leon Kennedy and Barry Burton from the games; and Luther West from the previous movie. And a bunch of other mooks that quickly die because they are unimportant. After this huge exposition sequence, we get the typical tense music and action scenes. Alice and Ada fight against two giant Executioner Majini in Fake Times Square, which... not going to lie, is awesome. Alice is still the writers' favourite character, but at least they're willing to give secondary characters a chance to shine, too, because Ada Wong gets a couple of badass action sequences here. The Leon/Luther squad get pinned down by a mass amount of Las Plagas in the Moscow zone, which hilariously has things like chainsaws and rocket launchers (accurate to the games but very random in the movies) and most of the non-named characters get killed by the grinning Plagas zombies.

Alice and Ada, meanwhile, encounter little Becky from the prologue, and we get the Aliens plot! Badass woman protagonist meets scared child, and her maternal instinct activates. I'm not complaining, giving an established badass the chance to take care of a child is an easy but effective way to give him or her a chance to get some primo characterization. Just see Ripley, Wolverine, Mandalorian, et cetera. And Becky's state of mistaking Alice-Prime for one of the faceless clones that served as her mom is... an interesting one. It's just a shame that the movie doesn't really try to explore this too much beyond 'protect the child!' 

Also speaking of wasted potentials, Alice and Ada fight against a group of clones of Alice's old allies. We've got One, we've got Rain, we've got Carlos. And sure, seeing the actors back and everything is very cool (even though I don't think Evil Carlos even got a memorable line). And... and we don't even get anything much out of them beyond 'look at this good guys doing evil things'. Alice gets with the program that these guys are clones almost immediately, which is understandable since she's dealt with clones before, but it brings to mind what the Doylist point of bringing these clones back in the first place. Hell, as Alice and Becky meet up with 'good' Rain, she doesn't even get to meet her evil clone! We don't even get that obvious subplot!

Alice leaves Good Rain and Becky behind to steal a sports car for some street stunts, because at this point the survivors of Team Leon are trying to escape the car-driving Plagas zombies in a pretty entertaining explody-splody car chase. The Red Queen unleashes a particularly giant Licker, and with Alice's help, the good guys escape by, uh, launching the car into a subway station which sure looks awesome but also is clearly impractical. The giant Licker seemingly gets buried. We jump to the next action scene, where they are about to go up the lift, but mind-controlled Jill Valentine and the Clone Squad arrive. Good Rain gets killed with little fanfare, Becky is abducted (Aliens!) and cocooned (ALIENSSSS), and the secondary characters shoot at each other while Alice goes off to recover Becky. It happens kind of quickly, but I actually do like Barry Burton's last stand. Again, kind of over-the-top and I really wish the movie gives us more to care about Barry beyond his red jacket and one or two zingers, but him doing a mutual kill with Agent One is pretty neat.

Alice killing the Giant Licker happens a bit quickly, too, although she and Becky at least gets a token bit of seeing the clone factory and Alice's line of "I'm your mom now". Again, the setup to reach this sequence is kind of messy, but I did like the Alice/Becky sequence. Anyway, Leon and Luther manage to escape with the lifts, the bombs they put earlier in the movie explode and destroy the facility (and kills clone Carlos very unceremoniously). 

Hey, the movie is over, and they can return to their base, right? Not really, because Jill Valentine and Clone Rain show up with a giant submarine that breaks the ice. They hold Ada Wong hostage, and we get a final boss fight battle. And... the choreography between Alice and Ada is actually pretty cool! They keep pulling out wacky weapons like spiky staves and fold-out scythes and that's pretty neat. Clone Rain, meanwhile, injects herself with the Las Plagas parasite which basically turns her into a bullet-immune Wolverine-style character, spitting out bullets from her fingertips, and Rain fights both Leon and Luther. Luther gets killed with a chest palm strike; Alice rips the mind-control spider from Jill's chest, and Clone Rain manages to beat everyone and is actually pretty badass. Alice eventually shoots out the ice under Rain's foot, causing her to fall into the water and be dragged down by underwater zombies. 

Again... it's an action scene where 'this thing happens, then that thing happens', but sure, it's pretty entertaining. Time for an epilogue, too, as the survivors bugger off to the White House, where Albert Wesker smugly sits in the Oval Office. He re-infects Alice to give her back her superhuman powers (god damn it, movie makers) in order to turn her into the 'ultimate weapon', and the final shot is that of the White House under siege not only by a horde of zombies, but giant flying zombie moths. 

And... and hoo boy, what an interesting movie, huh? The actual story of Alice and company escaping the underwater base is actually pretty solid. Michelle Rodrigues and Sienna Guillory play pretty fun and badass antagonists. Hell, I'd even go as saying the Alice/Becky storyline is all right. And the action scene is sure fun, and there are a lot of great moments in the movie all around. But honestly, as an installment in an ongoing series? It's extremely messy. None of the homages really work out all that well, and the attempted 'canon welding' or whatever the hell they're doing here feel like two steps back after Afterlife. It's still fun to watch, ultimately, because the shameless video-game visuals of jumping from one city 'stage' to the next and the higher-than-normal amount of action scenes makes it a fun action movie, but ultimately it's a messy one with a lot of missed potentials. 

Random Notes:

• Mind-controlled Jill Valentine is an actual boss from Resident Evil 5, complete with purple spy bodysuit. The 'Las Plagas Undead', explicitly named by the Red Queen, are sort-of based on the Las Plagas from Resident Evil 4, except a whole more over-the-top and without actually showing the zombie flower-mouths exhibited elsewhere in Afterlife and Retribution. The actual Plagas enemies in RE4 actually do use chainsaws and rocket launchers, though. The Kipipeo giant moth. makes a couple of brief cameos at the end of the movie. 
• The RE5-style flower-mouth Plagas and the Executioner Majini make a return after appearing in the previous movie. The Lickers return from the first two movies of this franchise, albeit this one is far more giant and muscular. 
• Leon Kennedy, Ada Wong and Barry Burton from the games make their cinematic debuts here. Ada is more or less pretty similar to her game counterpart as far as her role goes, but the other two are kind of just there. The 'J-Pop Girl' at the opening sequence of Afterlife also makes a return cameo here!
• Meanwhile, the fates of the Redfield siblings are left utterly ambiguous, because the actors are unable to return due to scheduling conflicts -- Claire does return in the next and final one, though. 
• So the ridiculously resourceful Umbrella corporation has access not only to cloning technology, but also to entire blocks modeled after the world's biggest cities (we see at least New York, Tokyo and Moscow) and is able to have massive cloning facilities, with each clone having enough of an implanted personality to behave and think that they are regular people... all just to demonstrate the power of the T-Virus. All that despite the cloning thing (or even the fake cities) being probably far, far more marketable. 
• Speaking of which, at least this sort of clears up where Umbrella keeps getting their seemingly endless source of faceless soldier-men in Extinction and Afterlife. Sort of.
• If Umbrella can basically implant memories to make the clones loyal to them, why not implant said memories to make an army of Umbrella-loyal psychic Alice clones? 
• Poor Clone Carlos really doesn't even get a good moment, huh? 
• Clone Rain's Plagas-injecting syringe is actually point-for-point identical to the syringe used in the Resident Evil 4 game. Clone Rain ejecting bullets out of her fingers thanks to her Plagas mutation is also something done by the final boss of RE4, Saddler. 
• I'm still not entirely sure how a mind-control device is placed on one's chest instead of the head or spine, and... and somehow when Alice rips it out, there isn't even like any scars. Okay.