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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.

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. She wakes up in a suburban house with a husband and a deaf daughter called Becky just as an outbreak begins, dies, and wakes up again 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.

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 Carlos and One from the first film, 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.

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.

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, but they’re a setting for fights and cameos, and the plot barely moves the series on.

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.

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.

Rating: 2.5 to 3 out of 5. Some good action and it was great to see familiar faces again, but nothing much happens and Alice as a mom didn’t land for me. The White House ending with the zombie hordes was cool, and it’s the part I’d point people to. It’s a film for people who are already along for the whole ride.

I didn’t love Resident Evil Afterlife, and I’d put it at somewhere between a 3 and a 3.5. It isn’t a bad film, and there’s plenty in here that I enjoyed, but it isn’t up there with the first, second and third. It was shot in 3D and built to show it off, and that gimmick just didn’t work for me. It opens in rain-soaked Tokyo as the first infection spreads, then cuts to a squad of Alice clones storming Umbrella’s underground headquarters, and all the way through it things keep flying at the camera. That shtick sits on top of the whole film, and once I’d noticed it I couldn’t stop noticing it.

The bigger problem is what they do with Alice. We spent three movies building her into a superhero, and then Wesker escapes by aircraft and injects her with a serum that strips her powers, and that’s that. She’s human again, quickly and easily, and after everything that came before it felt like a bit of a copout to me. The story had painted itself into a corner with how powerful she’d become, and pressing a reset button was the way out. I’d have liked to see them deal with it in a way that felt earned, because the powers were the whole reason the last two films looked the way they did.

Arcadia, a prison and Chris Redfield

With her powers gone, Alice flies a small plane to Alaska to find Arcadia, the safe zone from the last film, and finds an empty airfield with just Claire Redfield on it, who has no memory and a mechanical scarab clamped to her chest. They fly south and land on the roof of a prison in Los Angeles that’s surrounded by thousands of the dead. Inside is a small group of survivors led by an ex-basketball player called Luther, and in one of the cells is Chris Redfield, Claire’s brother and the lead of the games, who finally turns up four films in. From the roof they can see that Arcadia isn’t a place at all. It’s a ship anchored off the coast, broadcasting for survivors.

The prison is the closest the series gets to the old feel of being stuck somewhere with a few people and something terrible outside. The dead dig under the walls, and eventually a giant hooded monster with an enormous axe breaks in, which comes straight out of the games. The survivors have to escape through the sewers to the ship, and not all of them make it, and one of them grabs the plane and leaves everybody else behind. Things flying at the camera stay a big part of how it’s shot, from axes to coins, and for me that was more distracting than exciting.

The baddies still work

What I’ll give it is that the villains are still a good match for the games, which I liked. The Executioner looks like he’s walked out of one, and the fight in the flooded shower block, with Alice and Claire against him in slow motion, is one of the better ones in the film. Wesker turns up in his sunglasses and black coat as the new face of Umbrella, and by the end he’s half monster and fast enough to dodge bullets. Alice, Claire and Chris take him on together in a fight that’s clearly modelled on the games, and that’s a piece I enjoyed even with the gimmick working against it.

Some of the fights are fun in their own right, and I did enjoy those. When the survivors reach the ship they find that Arcadia is a trap and Umbrella keeps people on board as test subjects, and they free the prisoners, including K-Mart from the third film, before it all goes wrong. The film ends the way this series seems to end every time. Umbrella gunships appear on the horizon led by Jill Valentine, who has a scarab of her own stuck on her chest, and it stops on a to be continued.

Rating: 3 to 3.5 out of 5. It wasn’t my favourite of the series. The 3D didn’t work for me, taking away Alice’s powers was a copout after building her up for three films, and the good parts, the baddies matching the games and some of the fights, weren’t quite enough to lift it any higher. If you’re a fan of the series you’ll still want to see it, and I’m glad I did.

I’ll give Resident Evil Extinction a 4 out of 5, and I’ll be upfront that it took a slightly different turn than I was expecting. I know it’s a zombie film, but this third one has gone somewhere new: the T-virus didn’t stay in Raccoon City, it killed off most of the world and dried the planet out with it, and America is now a desert. After the first film in the Hive and the streets of the second, a big open landscape with dust and sun in every shot is a very different kind of movie. I still enjoyed it, just not as much as the other two. It’s a strange feeling, because on paper this is the one I should like most. It’s got the biggest ideas, the widest shots and the strangest villain, and yet the two earlier films stuck with me more.

Alice is on her own on a motorbike, keeping away from Umbrella’s satellites, because she now has psychic powers and Umbrella can use her to track anyone who gets close to her. And her powers seem to have no limit whatsoever. The film opens with a fake-out, too: Alice wakes in the mansion shower again and works her way through the first film’s traps, until she dies at the end of them. She’s a clone, one of many being run through the course in an underground base in the Nevada desert, so that Umbrella can work out what makes the real Alice special. I loved that twist, and it’s the best idea in the movie. Other fans seem to have liked the dusty, run-down look and the crow attack too, and I’m with them on both. Seeing the same shower and the same corridor again, only this time as a test rig, made me sit up in a way the rest of the film sometimes didn’t.

The convoy, the crows and Las Vegas

The rest of the film follows a convoy of survivors led by Claire Redfield, Chris’s sister from the games, played by Ali Larter, with Carlos and L.J. from the last film along for the ride and a teenager called K-Mart named after the store where she was found. Alice runs into them after finding a diary that points to Arcadia, a supposed safe zone in Alaska, and she joins them heading north. It gives the movie a road-trip shape, and it’s a nice way to bring a few faces back. The desert looks great, and it’s basically Mad Max with zombies, which is a sentence I never expected to write about this series. Every shot is bleached and dry, and after two films of corridors and city streets it’s a relief to see the sky. The survivors’ trucks and the dust trails behind them feel like they belong in a different franchise altogether, and I mean that as a compliment.

The stand-out sequence is at an abandoned motel, where hundreds of infected crows attack the convoy and Alice burns them out of the sky with her mind. It’s spectacular, and it’s also the best example of how far her power has gone, which brings me back to my problem with it. When she can do that, there isn’t much left that can threaten her, so the tension has to come from everyone around her. The half-buried Las Vegas they head into for fuel and supplies, with casino signs poking out of the sand, is the film’s best location, and it’s where things go wrong.

Clones, and Umbrella’s bad plan

Vegas is a trap. Dr. Isaacs, the scientist behind the clone experiments, has been breeding faster, smarter zombies, and he sets them on the convoy. L.J. hides a bite, turns, and bites Carlos, and Carlos drives a fuel tanker into the horde to clear a path and blows himself up. The rest of the survivors fly on towards Alaska while Alice goes into Isaacs’ base to finish this on her own. He’s been bitten too, overdoses on anti-virus and turns into a mutated Tyrant, and the final fight takes place in a copy of the laser corridor, where one of Alice’s clones lends a hand.

Here’s what I couldn’t get past. Umbrella keeps experimenting with viruses and clones and superhuman soldiers, and you’d think that somewhere in that company there’d be at least one person with a modicum of brains who could see that this isn’t going to end well for them. Every time they push it further, it blows up in their faces, and they just carry on. It undercuts the stakes for me, because the villains seem to be working against their own interests, and it made me care a bit less about how the story was going to resolve. I’d have happily swapped a couple of the big set pieces for one scene where somebody at Umbrella says out loud that this might be a bad idea. Even a single line would have done it, and the film never gives me one.

The ending turns towards the next film. Alice contacts Umbrella’s chairman, Albert Wesker, in Tokyo, tells him she’s coming for him, and behind her an army of clones is waking up. The army of clones is the payoff for that opening fake-out, which ties the film together neatly. It’s a big finish and it’s got me curious about where they go next.

Rating: 4 out of 5. I did enjoy this one, but it isn’t my favourite of the three. The clones as a twist were great, Alice’s power scale has no limits, and I wish Umbrella had a single sensible person in the building. It’s still a fun watch, and the desert setting gives it a look the others don’t have.

Another solid 5 out of 5 from me. Resident Evil Apocalypse picks up right where the first film left off, with Alice waking up alone in that empty hospital and walking out into a Raccoon City that has already gone to hell, and it doesn’t waste a minute getting going. The big difference this time is that the games are all over it. There are characters and monsters in here lifted straight out of them, and it’s a lot of fun watching them show up on screen. The action has been ramped up as well, so if the last film kept you leaning forward, this one has you gripping the armrest.

The set-up is simple, and it works. Umbrella has reopened the Hive to find out what went wrong, the infection has got out, and within a night the whole city is walled off with everyone still inside. The company lets its own executives out and leaves everybody else to fend for themselves. What follows is a night of running through the streets with a small group of survivors who don’t trust each other much, which is exactly the right shape for this kind of film, and it gives the story a real sense of a place falling apart around the characters. I’ll admit I was a bit worried going in, because the first film was such a self-contained little thing and I wasn’t sure a bigger budget wouldn’t just sand the edges off. It doesn’t, or at least not so I noticed while it was on. The city feels lived-in for about ten minutes and then it feels like a war zone, and the film spends the rest of its runtime somewhere between the two.

Jill, Carlos and the games

Jill Valentine is the big one. She’s a suspended cop here, and they’ve dressed her like the game character right down to the blue top. Sienna Guillory plays her quick and tough, and when there’s a gun in her hands she looks like she knows exactly what to do with it. Carlos is an Umbrella soldier left behind with his unit, another name from the games, and a small-time hustler called L.J. is there to crack most of the jokes. It’s a proper little team, and the more of them there are, the more the film feels like a game where you’re switching between characters as the mission changes. Other fans of the games have pointed out that this one at least tries to tie itself to the source material much harder than the first film did, and I’d agree that’s the part that sold it to me. Seeing a name I’d only ever read in a menu screen suddenly walking around with a face is a bit of a thrill, and I’m not too proud to say so.

The hook that drives the plot is a good one, too. The scientist who created the T-virus is stuck outside the wall while his young daughter Angela is trapped in a school in the city, and he hacks into the phones and offers the survivors a way out if they bring her to him. That gives everyone a destination and a clock, which suits this kind of movie perfectly. The school is a great change of scenery after the last film spent so long underground, and it’s full of infected kids, which makes for some properly uncomfortable moments before the group moves on. It’s the sort of scene where I found myself wanting the film to hurry up and also not wanting it to end, and I think that’s about the best thing you can say for a horror set piece. The team has to work out how to get a bunch of frightened kids out of a place that’s swarming with the dead, and nobody in the group is exactly qualified for it.

Alice, superhero

Alice has changed, and you can see it from her very first big moment. She crashes a motorbike through the window of a church and lands in the middle of a nest of Lickers, and from there she stays fast, strong and very hard to kill, because Umbrella has been experimenting on her. She’s basically a superhero now, and I know some people will roll their eyes at that. I’m okay with it. After the first film left her stranded and alone, giving her a reason to be this dangerous makes sense to me, and it keeps the action interesting. I’d sooner she was overpowered and fun than have the film pretend she’d learned nothing from the last one. The bike through the church window is exactly the kind of daft, glorious entrance I’m here for, and it sets the tone for how seriously the film takes itself, which is to say not very, and never in a way that got in my way.

The action is bigger across the board. There are zombie dogs, the infected kids at the school, a graveyard sequence, and the Lickers again, and it all moves at a pace that never lets you get comfortable. Spotting the game references turns into a bit of a game of its own, and Nemesis is the best example of one. He’s a huge, hulking bioweapon with a rocket launcher who walks through anything in his way, and he’s played very close to how he looks in the games. Watching him stalk the survivors through the city gives the whole film a sense of dread that the first one only touched on. Every time he shows up the film changes gear, and the survivors stop being a group of people trying to leave and start being prey. If you’ve played the game where he chases you from room to room, that feeling will be very familiar, and I thought the film caught it better than I’d expected.

The ending

Nemesis turns out to be somebody from the first film, which I’ll leave you to find out. There’s a moment where Umbrella forces Alice to fight him so they can show off what their project can do, and it goes somewhere more interesting than a straight brawl. Once that’s done, the city’s fate is sealed: a nuke flattens Raccoon City at dawn, and Umbrella covers it up as a power plant meltdown. The survivors barely get a moment to breathe before their helicopter comes down and everything goes wrong again.

The ending sets up another film without cheating you out of this one. Alice wakes up in an Umbrella facility and breaks out, and Jill, Carlos and L.J. pick her up on the way out. An Umbrella scientist watches her go and tells someone the programme is working, so it’s clear she isn’t as free as she thinks she is. I liked that it left a question hanging over her, and it gave the film a reason to feel like part of something bigger.

Rating: 5 out of 5. I really enjoyed this one, and it’s a solid follow-up to the first film. There are so many characters and elements picked straight from the game that it feels like a proper Resident Evil movie, and the action has clearly been ramped up. Alice starts to look like a superhero, but I’m fine with that.

Five out of five, and I’m saying it up front because I keep going back and forth on how to open this one. Here’s where I land on Resident Evil 2002: I’ve played the games, I know full well this isn’t a straight adaptation of any of them, and I had a great time anyway. There’s a mansion, there’s Umbrella, there’s the T-virus and the zombies and the dogs, and then it takes all of that and tells its own story with none of the characters I know from the games. Normally that would bug me. It doesn’t here, mostly because there’s enough game in it that I kept going oh, there’s that, and enjoying the fact that I’d spotted it.

I’m not a horror person, for the record. I don’t go looking for gore, and the jump scares in this one turn up every few minutes like clockwork, so I’d been a bit wary of going in. But there’s enough running and shooting and hitting things that I could stomach the ugly bits, which is more or less how I’d describe the whole film: horror wearing an action movie’s boots. Milla Jovovich wakes up in the shower of a big empty mansion with no idea who she is, and not long after, a squad of commandos crashes in and drags her and a stray cop underground. Everything from there is a chase through a very well-designed hole in the ground, and I was on board for all of it.

Down into the Hive

The hole is called the Hive, and it’s the best thing about the look of the film. Long white corridors, glass everywhere, that clinical Umbrella logo on the walls, and a train line dropping you into it from the mansion above. Somebody has stolen the T-virus and smashed a vial on the way out, so the Red Queen seals the whole place up and kills everyone inside to contain it. She’s the facility’s computer, and she turns up as a hologram of a little girl, which is creepy in exactly the right way because she’s so calm and polite about the whole thing. The commandos want to shut her down before she does the same to them, and Alice, who’s slowly getting her memory back in pieces, has to decide who she’s actually working for.

Then there’s the laser corridor. I can’t talk about this movie without talking about it, because it’s the scene I’d put in front of anyone who asked me whether to bother watching. The commandos walk down a narrow hallway, the Red Queen flips a switch, and a grid of lasers slices straight through them, and their commander goes in pieces. It’s fast, it’s brutal, and it’s oddly graceful, and it was amazing. Everything else in the film has to live up to it, and honestly a lot of it does.

Alice and Matt, the cop, and Rain, who’s the toughest soldier on the team, are what’s left after that, and the rest of the movie is them trying to shut the Red Queen down without making things worse. Shutting her down makes things worse, obviously. The doors open, the dead staff get back up, and that’s when it stops being a locked-room thriller and turns into what I actually came for. Watching the group split up and get picked off, one bad decision after another, is half the fun, and the film never loses its nerve about killing people off.

Where the games show up

The mansion at the start, the Umbrella name, zombie dogs crashing through windows, all of it is lifted from the games. So is the Licker, which is the best monster in the film: skinless, tongue-first, and horrible to watch scrambling around a room. None of the characters from the games turn up, though, so Alice is a brand new person who doesn’t remember she works for Umbrella, and I went along with that fine because Jovovich makes her tough without making her cold. Spence, the man who says he’s her husband, is the one who stole the virus in the first place, which is a decent twist on the way to a nasty end for him.

People will argue about that choice, and I get why. Other fans who liked it anyway land in the same place I do, calling it unfaithful but fun. If you want Jill and Chris and the rest, this isn’t going to be your film, and I’m sure plenty of people who’ve played the games will say so. For me the elements it kept were enough to make it interesting. The mansion feels like the mansion, the enemies feel like the enemies, and once the lights go out and something’s clawing at the door, it’s close enough to playing the game at two in the morning that I was happy. I’ll take a cousin of the game done this well over a copy that doesn’t move.

The noise, the fights and that last shot

The soundtrack is loud, industrial, metal-flavoured, and I loved it. It’s exactly the music you’d want under a woman in a red dress kicking a zombie dog in the face. The fights, Alice launching a running kick at a zombie dog and the walking dead shambling down the corridors, are properly staged, so you can see what’s happening and enjoy it, and that matters to me more than the blood does. There’s a lot of them, they’re inventive, and they don’t overstay their welcome, which is how I’d like every zombie film to handle it. Rain gets bitten and starts turning, Matt takes a swipe from a Licker, and the group thins out on the way to the surface in a way that keeps the tension up right to the end.

The ending is a good one and I won’t spoil all of it. Umbrella scientists get hold of Matt, and someone mentions a Nemesis program, which anyone who’s played the games will recognise. Alice wakes up alone in an empty hospital, walks out into a wrecked Raccoon City, and picks up a shotgun. It’s a proper cliffhanger, and it sets up more of this world without pretending the story is finished.

Rating: 5 out of 5. I really enjoyed this one, start to finish. The laser corridor was amazing and I loved the soundtrack and the action fights, and even with the jump scares and the gore I never wanted to look away. If you’ve played the games, go in expecting a cousin and not a copy, and I think you’ll have a good time.