Resident Evil: Retribution (2012): A Facility Full of Familiar Faces

I’d give Resident Evil Retribution a 2.5 or a 3, probably only a 2.5 if I’m being straight about it. There are some good action sequences in it, and it’s good to see some favourite faces back again, but it feels to me like nothing really happened in this one. After the way Afterlife ended, with Jill’s gunships coming over the horizon and a promise of a big fight, I was hoping the fifth film would take the story somewhere. Instead it mostly gets Alice back to where she was at the start of the last film, powers and all, and that’s about it.

Where Afterlife left her

It opens with the fight on the Arcadia deck played backwards in slow motion, which is a neat way to catch you up, and then Jill’s gunships hit the ship and Alice goes into the sea. That’s the cliffhanger the last film promised, and I’ll give this one credit for picking it up straight away rather than skipping ahead a few months. And then it does something I didn’t expect. She wakes up in a suburban house with a husband and a deaf daughter called Becky just as an outbreak begins, and it plays for a good few minutes like the start of a small, nasty horror film of its own, right up until she dies and wakes up again, this time in an Umbrella cell.

That’s where the film really starts. She’s being held in a huge base under the ice in Kamchatka, in Russia, and the rest of the movie is her trying to get out of it. It’s a simple enough setup, and honestly simple is fine for this series. The trouble is that the whole second half of the previous film was about Alice finally being a normal person again, with her powers gone, and Retribution quietly spends its first act undoing that and handing her the same toolkit she started with. I wasn’t expecting a big reset button.

For anyone who skipped the last one, Afterlife ended with the Arcadia, the supposed safe haven, turning out to be a trap, and Jill showing up with a fleet and a promise that the real fight was coming. So walking into the fifth film I had a fairly clear idea of what I wanted, which was Alice and Jill, a proper confrontation, a story that went somewhere. The film does give me Jill and Alice squaring up, I’ll say that, with the scarab on her chest, and I’ll come to that in a minute.

A facility full of familiar faces

The base is full of life-size simulations of cities, Tokyo, New York, Moscow and a suburb, which Umbrella uses to test outbreaks and sell its bioweapons. It’s mostly a way to bring the old faces back, because everyone in the simulations is a clone. That’s how Rain turns up again, along with One from the first film and Carlos, who we last saw in Apocalypse, and it was good to see them. It’s a way to let characters who’d been killed off come back, even if it’s a bit of a cheat, and the film plays with the idea that one person can turn up more than once.

The Red Queen is running Umbrella now and is trying to wipe out humanity. Wesker has turned against her and sends Ada Wong to break Alice out, and he sends a team from outside too, including Leon Kennedy, Barry Burton and Luther from the last film, to meet her before the place floods. Ada Wong, Leon and Barry are all characters from the games, and it was good to have them turn up. Jill is back as well, but as a villain, mind-controlled with the scarab on her chest, and she’s the one who ends up fighting Alice until the scarab gets torn off. The clone idea explains in one go why a dead character can walk back on screen, and it lets the film lean on the series’ history without stopping to explain any of it. You see someone from an earlier film and you know who they are, even if the film is quick to remind you they’re not quite the same person. It’s a lot of names for a hundred minutes, and for a few stretches it plays more like a roll call than a story, but I’d take that over a film with nobody I recognised.

Good action, not much story

The action is good. There’s a Tokyo street full of the dead, a clone of Rain with powers, zombies on motorbikes firing machine guns in Moscow, and a giant Licker out on the ice, and there are some really good sequences in there. The sets, from the ice to the simulated cities, give it a bigger look than the previous ones. It’s an easy film to watch if you’re in it for the action, and the fights don’t let up for long. Love Horror’s review is written by someone who’s been along for the whole series, if you want another fan’s view of it.

But that’s where my problem comes in. Alice escapes, gets her powers back and ends up in a similar spot to where the last film began, and basically we could have skipped both this film and the last one. It feels like two films’ worth of running in place. The simulations are a fun idea, a whole facility built to stage outbreaks in familiar places, but they’re a setting for fights and cameos, and the plot barely moves the series on. I kept waiting for one of those cities to matter beyond being somewhere to shoot at zombies. It never did.

And that’s the whole of my complaint, really, because the individual pieces are fine. The Tokyo street is nicely staged, the Moscow chase has the right mix of silliness and noise, and the Licker out on the ice is big and gloopy and exactly what I want from one of these. Take any of them on its own and I’d say yes, more of that please. String them together and you notice that Alice finishes the film in much the same place as she began the last one, with the same powers, the same enemies and a slightly bigger army outside. A film can run on action alone, and this one mostly does, but I’d hoped for a bit more from the fifth one.

Alice as a mom, and that ending

I didn’t really care for Alice as a mom, either. She finds a clone of Becky in the facility and takes her along for the rest of the film, and Alice spends a lot of time playing mother to her. It didn’t work for me. It felt like a detour, and it slowed the film down whenever it came up, usually right as a fight was getting going. The idea is that Alice has someone to protect, and I can see why they went for it, since the film opens on her as a mother in that suburban house and wants to bring it back around. But I never bought into the bond. Becky is a clone, a copy of a copy of a life Alice never actually had, and the film asks me to feel a lot about her in very little time. Every pause for a quiet moment between the two of them felt like the movie stopping to take a breath it didn’t need.

What did work was the ending. At the White House, which is now humanity’s last fortress, Wesker gives Alice her powers back and tells her it’s humanity’s last stand. Then the camera pulls out over hordes of the dead and flying monsters closing in on the building. That was cool, and it’s the one moment in the film that felt like the story had finally moved. It’s the first image in the film that made me sit up, with the building small in the frame and the whole of the dead world heading for it, and it’s the point where I wanted the next film to start. It’s a shame the other hundred-odd minutes didn’t build to something like it, because the ending shows what the series can still do when it commits to a scale.

Rating: 2.5 to 3 out of 5. It’s a film for people who are already along for the whole ride.

Which Resident Evil character would you most want to see back with a proper story of their own? Tell me in the comments.