Movie review: Resident Evil:
 Retribution **

Stars: Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Michelle Rodriguez
Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Rated: R
Showing: Liberty Theatre week of Friday, September 21 – Friday-Saturday 2:30|7:30pm; Sunday 2:30|5:30pm; Monday-Thursday 2:30|6:00pm. For more information call 292-7296.
Tickets: Buy tickets online
Runtime: 95 minutes
Action/horror

Five films, over $660 million at the worldwide box office ... you have to hand it to Resident Evil. In 10 years, it has become — while few who enjoy good films have noticed — the most successful video-game film franchise in history.

These movies have kept action-horror hack Paul W.S. Anderson in business and sustained model-turned-actress Milla Jovovich in between her other rare appearances on the big screen.

The movies? To a one, violent, nonsensical bloodbaths, badly written, flatly acted. At least last time, in Resident Evil: Afterlife, they seemed to spend some money and expand their vision of the combat zone, which resulted in a bigger, more action-packed and by far more successful exercise in first-person shooter mayhem.

But from the obviously digitally augmented action to the disconcertingly disembodied voices of the actors, Resident Evil: Retribution seems to remove whatever ambition they let themselves develop and take this dog-eared franchise back to square one.

Anderson returns to the director’s chair for the third time, which means he isn’t out re-butchering The Three Musketeers, so be grateful for that. He gives us a film with three different openings — a rewind-the-last-film prologue, with bio-altered “security expert” Alice (Jovovich) getting us up to date on the first four films. “At last,” she narrates, “we thought we had survived the horror.”

But no. An imaginary Alice as housewife-mom is assaulted by zombies, followed by that inevitable moment when Alice wakes up, nearly naked, in a vast over-lit room where the Umbrella Corp. has her stashed. 

In Retribution, Alice is back in a super-secret Umbrella facility tasked with fighting her way out through various levels, “protocols,” basically gamescapes that recreate a zombie apocalypse in New York, suburbia, Tokyo and Moscow. Ada (Bingbing Li) is to be her guide. Valentine (Sienna Guillory) and Rain (big-screen tough-girl Michelle Rodriguez) are trying to stop her.

And a SWAT team is working its way into the facility to help her out.

As a few of her other films attest, Jovovich can still act, though you’d never know it from these bullets-and-bustiers pictures. She handles action choreography well, doesn’t ruin the few feeble one-liners Anderson writes for her and summons up a moment or two of lip-quivering fear in the film’s opening. But it’s a flat performance, a still-fit woman looking exhausted at playing shoot-em-up in a movie where empathy, plot and character development were sacrificed, if they were ever there to start with. 

The violence in Retribution is impersonal, gory and non-stop.

Which, due to the digital world of film these days, may be the fate of Resident Evil and Jovovich in it. It may never stop. They’ll keep doing more and more of her stunt work with computers, shaving years off her looks as she ages. Which may be the real “retribution” here: Another movie comes out to bad reviews, and as our punishment they keep making more.

Next attraction: TBA