Ticket Stubs #21: Resident Sequel - Countdown to Retribution
As promised at the end of the last issue of Ticket Stubs, I went to Moses Lake on Tuesday in my free jeans and free T-shirt to buy a ticket to Resident Evil: Retribution 3D with my free Fandango gift card and get my hands on a Coulson's Revenge gift card at the local GameStop. More on that later, but for now it's time to start the Countdown to Retribution with a flashback to April 21, 2012 (Welcome to the Dead Parade #4: Resident Sequel Update): Since I reviewed Resident Evil and Resident Evil: Apocalypse at the GodsOfMelee Yahoo! Group on December 30, 2004 (SW@ Ticket #27: Resident Sequel), I have developed an appreciation for the series that wasn't there at the time, when I had to wait between films. And since the first publication of Resident Sequel, three more have joined the franchise, there's no time like the present for a Ticket Stubs Update. Commencing countdown....
When a spy infiltrates the Hive and releases the deadly T-virus, the Red Queen defense computer goes nuts and everyone in the Hive gets turned into a zombie. A team of commandos must now rescue the amnesia-suffering Alice, shut down the Red Queen, kill all the zombies and mutants before they reach the surface, and escape with their lives. The Kick-Ass-Hero-With-Amnesia concept is a bit unoriginal--see The Bourne Identity, The Matrix, The Medallion, etc. The laughs are few and far between, and usually associated with shock at seeing someone sliced and diced by a laser grid or getting surprised by a monster. The scares are equally infrequent and misplaced so that nothing happens when a scare is expected and no fear is felt when the unexpected pops up. I often got a sense of Resident Evil being riddled with holes, none of which were created by bullets. Also, Milia Jovovich is hot, but with her 50% wardrobe (half-dressed half the time and mostly naked all the time) and the stupid names that Capcom came up with for stuff (STARS, Red Queen, The Hive, Umbrella, T-virus, Nemesis, and--worst of all, I think--Raccoon City) puts Resident Evil on the borderline between a very cheap action cartoon and a very expensive porno. Good action, good transition between films, average humor, and sub-par horror with blood and shit everywhere else.
D
FOUR....Resident Evil Apocalypse: Almost a mirror image of Dawn of the Dead, but with a few cheesy, overblown, funhouse changes. Alice is joined by STARS agent Jill Valentine and has been infected with the T-virus, giving her Matrix-like moves with which to whup on a new larger horde of zombies, mutant dogs, Lickers, and her fellow infected survivor from the last RE film, Nemesis (human form portrayed in the first RE by Ugly Betty's Eric Mabius). As in Dawn of the Dead, the action takes place above ground, there is a scattered group of survivors, and there is a comic relief sniper. Better action and comedy than the first, some of the holes created in RE get filled in, and the spoiler transition into Extinction is well planned. A little too long, a little unoriginal, but a slight improvement over the first.
C+
THREE....Resident Evil Extinction: Having done some research into the Resident Evil Universe, I have come to recognize most of the characters by name, which has helped develop my appreciation for the film series since reviewing the first two films in 2004. The third installment managed to deliver on the promise made at the end of Apocalypse.
The nuking of Raccoon City failed to contain the spread of the T-Virus, which has gone global in the course of a few months. Alice, Carlos (Oded Fehr, Charmed), and LJ (Mike Epps) return, joined this time by Claire (Ali Larter, Heroes) and an armored caravan of survivors trying to cross the Nevada desert on their way to sanctuary in Alaska. But as usual, zombies, infected wildlife (the crows hinted at in the first Resident Evil finally make their presence known), and the film's main baddie, Tyrant, stand in their way. Alice's new psychic powers are made good use of--enough to be helpful but not so much that the movie becomes boring--and the frequent malfunctioning of her control program makes things interesting as parallel stories weave together toward yet another impressive spoiler ending. By the way, where the hell is Jill Valentine?
B-
TWO....We find out the answer to that question by the end credits of Resident Evil Afterlife: The movie opens with some self-referential commentary on plastic cinema; on the streets of Tokyo, Japan, mass-produced mannequins walk about in their daily lives, but then dissolve into unique flesh as we quickly learn that some of the masses are Undead.
Panning underground, we find that director Paul W.S. Anderson has once again made good on his spoiler promises. Alice and her clone army have stormed the local Umbrella compound, and are finally getting full mileage out of her T-Virus powers (thankfully including an impressive psychic display, the fourth since the end of Apocalypse). Unfortunately the clones were disposed of too quickly, and thanks to a sneak attack by Albert Wesker (Diary Of the Dead's Shawn Roberts), Alice is left without her powers. How can a movie be so impressive and so underwhelming at the same time?
After finishing her business with Umbrella, Alice makes her way to Alaska, which proves to be deserted until she is attacked by a brainwashed Claire Redfield wearing a weird crab-like device (the same as we see Jill wearing in the end credits' spoiler).
The two fly to a Los Angeles prison where they meet Luther (Boris Kodjoe), Bennett (Kim Coates from Sons Of Anarchy), and Claire's estranged brother Chris (ironically, Chris, whom we first meet locked in a jail cell, is played by Prison Break star Wentworth Miller).
Standing between them and the Arcadia (an Umbrella research ship claiming to be the infection-free town in Alaska) is the usual city-wide horde of zombies, mutants, and requisite big-bads (of which there are two this time: a nearly indestructible executioner-type mutant called the Axeman, and the hyperspeedy, red-eyed Wesker).
The new four-jawed zombie effects were cool (especially the split-headed Cerberus dogs), and the Axeman fight sequence was really well-done (perhaps the best in the movie, even including the opening sequence mentioned above). But as the first film in the series to use 3D, it didn't succeed as well as it could have. Comparing Afterlife to a 3D success story like Hugo or Avatar is like comparing Star Wars to less stellar sci-fi space adventures of its time: they attempt to use smaller budget effects to create something on a larger scale that winds up looking like, well, a bunch of plastic mannequins floating on a green-screen.
The 3D effects here amount to little more than slow-motion close-ups, obvious wire-work, and the occasional computer-generated weapon or shard of glass flying sluggishly toward the camera. The result is cool enough, but not always good enough.
C
ONE....Welcome, readers, to the first SW@ Ticket Sniperscope posting in over seven years!
Just like SW@ Ticket, the Sniperscope has grown up by dropping the SW@ and come back (from the dead, LOL) with a brand new name as of April 21, 2012 (Coming Distractions #1: Red Dead Retribution). With the return of the Dead Parade on Just the Ticket, and a new Resident Evil sequel coming out later this year, I thought this would be the perfect time to share the latest Coming Distraction:
Hopefully the hype is representative of the movie, but right now I don't care. I just want to see the movie as soon as possible.
ZERO....This is it, Ticketholders! The moment of Retribution is finally here, and I discovered that I should have cared a bit more about the deceptive nature of hype (damn you, Flavor Flav!). But moron that in a few moments. For now, let's talk about what happened before my moviegoing experience. First of all, I missed the bus because I was waiting on the wrong side of the street and had to chase it (unsuccessfully) to the next bus stop because they don't let fat people be Spider-Man. Luckily, the bus in the opposite direction was headed to the same place for its last stop, so I was able to catch it into Moses Lake and get off at Wal-Mart, where I walked to GameStop and found out that their superiors had told them to trash all the Facebook cards the previous day and they probably wouldn't get anymore in before the promotion ended, so I still don't have the BFG of Marvel Avengers Alliance at my disposal. After getting a self-consoling beverage at Starbucks, I proceeded to walk the remaining mile or so to Fairchild Cinemas, where they would not accept my free Fandango Gift Card, forcing me to shell out $16 for a ticket and glasses, plus another $6.25 for popcorn and a drink. They can be affordable to live in, but when it comes to free viewership at the local theater, I say Fuck Small Towns. And now that we are sitting and watching the movie, let's get critical.
Following previews of The Man With the Iron Fists, Dredd 3D, and a new Devil May Cry game, there begins a movie of a disastrously regressive nature.
Rather than Addiction or Retribution, this fifth element to the franchise (see what I did there?) should be subtitled Gimmick All-Stars. Making a return from the first film are the nudity (courtesy of Jovovich, once again) and bad acting (courtesy of a computer-controlled, blue catsuit-wearing, blonde ponytail-sporting Sienna Guillory), as are three characters we thought dead: Rain (zombified and headshot, played by Michelle Rodriguez), One (diced by a laser grid--another cameo, now red in color--played by Colin Salmon), and the Red Queen (turned off and fried by EMP, still played by Megan Charpentier, but more fake-looking and cartoonish than ever as the new film's puppetmaster and chief of underwhelming 3D effects). Also back from Resident Evil is the plot: Alice (minus her T-Virus powers, but still capable of the same level of unreal, wire-work-assisted ass-kickery for some reason), a mind-wiped clone of Rain (yes, the returning characters are clones, and yes, the clones go to waste...again), Luther, and new characters Becky (the "daughter" of an Alice clone, played by Aryana Engineer--what a name!--and possibly the "ultimate weapon against Umbrella" Luther speaks of), Ada Wong (Bingbing Li, looking like Capcom's usual breed of Asian martial arts slut), the famous horndog Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb), and Barry Burton (Citizen Gangster's Kevin Durand) must make their way out of the Umbrella Prime research facility while dodging and killing the usual zombies, monsters, and pseudo-human soldiers before the timer runs out and everything goes boom.
Other cameos from past Evils include Valentine and Carlos (Apocalypse), Wesker (Afterlife, now the Resident POTUS and claiming to be a good guy), the opening Japan sequence from Afterlife, and Apocalypse's status as a Romero rip-off (Retribution features an opening scene nearly identical to the intro of Dawn Of the Dead).
But where Retribution's predecessors (yes, even the other 3D mess, Afterlife) succeeded by playing to the zombie genre via one-by-one pickoffs and the human interest drama that comes with headshooting an infected comrade, the newest installment trades emotion and finessed gore for splattery multi-kills, recycled material, and mega-sized overdoses of ineffectively stylized action, butchering what otherwise could have been a fully fleshed story into a soulless, disconnected hint parade that asks too much of non-Resident fans and tries desperately to pack in as many flavors of Resident Evil mutation as possible, including a super-Licker, an army of skeleton-faced Plagas zombies, an indestructible Rain clone, an enhanced, Queen-controlled Jill Valentine, and (count 'em) two Axemen, all to satisfy the requirements of a mediocre venture into the third dimension. I miss the crows and Cerberus dogs.
Now, about the 3D: Once again, expect people to be breaking glass, blowing things up, flooding rooms, crashing helicopters in your faces, shooting and ejecting bullets, and throwing handguns, knives, and giant hammers at the camera in slow-motion; illusions that all fail when the objects reach the screen without jumping at your eyeballs (and yes, I was wearing my six-dollar plastic glasses, fuck you very much for asking). The horrible 3D effects also lend to the impression that Retribution is a poorly concocted video game with characters obviously superimposed on a computer-generated environment (which the Japan, Moscow, and Suburbia levels are, but unlike Alice and Company, I as a viewer would like to be deceived a little--no, a lot--better than I was). And Midway Games would be loath to find out that the movie ripped off Mortal Kombat 9's X-ray effects. Shame on you, Paul W.S. Anderson!
The only good things I have to say about Resident Evil: Retribution are that I was finally scared by not one, but three zombie attacks, and that the sixth installment to come will be the series' last. This shit is getting too old for me.
F+
So after many days of copying, pasting, typing, and hyperlinking, I've finally brought you the latest update on this dying franchise in desperate need of a headshot. I haven't really decided what to bring your way next, but it will contain a Critical Quickie or two and be a continuation of my current state of movie-related depression. Stay tuned for the fun to come.
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