A few days late,
as it was unscreened for critics here:
Resident Evil: The Final
Chapter—Alice,
played by Milla Jovovich, wriggles out of the ruins of the White House and
finds America still crawling with cannibal zombies, bio-engineered monsters and
amoral corporate mercenaries in armored vehicles. You know, the world the Trump
administration is striving for.
In this, the
sixth and supposedly the last installment of the series based on the gruesome
video game, the badass Alice must return to “Raccoon City” and the underground complex where
it all began. She hooks up with some allies—Ali Larter among them—and they try to retrieve some concoction that will shut
down the zombies. The corporate scumbags, among them a dastardly Iain Glen, try
to stop them.
These movies
represent almost everything I despise in contemporary big-budget
moviemaking—overblown, hyper-edited action, sterile CGI visuals, actors
growling humorless dialogue, too many endings. So it’s a little embarrassing to
admit that they’ve been a guilty pleasure for me over the years. Just possibly
the ever-fetching Jovovich has something to do with this.
I enjoyed this
one, too, but even so I’d agree that it’s time to retire the series. It starts
off well enough, as a straightforward chase picture, but when our heroes get to
the underground “Hive” it becomes, tediously, very much like a video game
indeed, with various “levels.” Also, it’s full of stuff that doesn’t make sense—why,
for just one example, do the bad guys wait to shut down the entrance to “The
Hive” until most of the heroes, who they knew were coming, have entered?
Happily, The
Final Chapter regains its footing in time for a reasonably entertaining final
confrontation. And despite the optimistic title, there’s absolutely no reason the
filmmakers couldn’t continue the saga if they wanted too.
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