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.