Anderson-returning to the director’s chair for the fourth time in the franchise’s history-is just shrewd enough to bookend the series, after a fashion. Resident Evil’s dubious auteur, Paul W.S.
#ARMOURED VEHICLE IN THE MOVIE RESIDENT EVIL FINAL CHAPTER SERIES#
Given that the series practically prides itself on the interchangeability of its individual entries, The Final Chapter is a fitting conclusion, as uniformly frenetic and mind-numbing as every other outing. This is essentially the plot of all of the Resident Evil features ever since zombies infected with the T-virus first escaped Umbrella’s subterranean research facility, called the Hive, at the conclusion of the first film. The film features a dizzying amount of double-crossing and side-switching between the franchise’s two factions: the Umbrella Corporation and, well, everyone else left on Earth. Alice struggles with her fragmentary, unreliable memory, but somehow survives repeated brushes with death, habitually dispatching her foes with elaborate, Hail Mary gambits. Along the way she runs into and joins up with a band of survivors, who are eventually killed off, quite messily, one by one. Super-powered badass Alice (Milla Jovovich), a former security officer for the global conglomerate known as the Umbrella Corporation, fights her way through the ruins of human civilization, slaying zombies and other bio-engineered monstrosities that have been unleashed on the world by her former employer. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is virtually indistinguishable from its predecessors.
Its worst sin might be its failure to be more gaudy and playful about its awfulness. The series is the cinematic equivalent of a gas station “meal” of cheesy nachos and an energy drink-and the filmmakers know it.
It might be chuckle-headed and monotonous, but at least it’s not pretentious.
The release of a fifth Underworld film and sixth Resident Evil film within a month of one another raises a vital question: Which of these joyless, unpleasant, and evidently immortal action-horror franchises is worse? They are both inveterately bad, but Underworld’s crappiness feels more egregious, somehow: It’s an utter waste of a juicy horror premise, and the filmmakers are obnoxiously self-assured that their series’ somber, lackluster aesthetic makes it “visionary.” Resident Evil has no illusions that its ultra-violent, post-zombocalyptic hoopla is in any way innovative.