Home
Home

Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

DVD Cover (Sony Home Entertainment)
Add to Collection
Sign up to add this to your collection
Add to Favorites
Sign up to add this to your favorites
Overall Rating 51%
Overall Rating
Ranked #1,227
...out of 20,319 movies
Check In? Sign up to check in!

Connections: Resident Evil

Alice awakes at home with her daughter Becky and her husband. But soon she realizes that she is actually in an Umbrella Corporation's underground facility. Out of the blue, the computer security system shuts-down and Alice flees to the central control room of the facility. She meets Ada Wong, who works with Albert Wesker, and she learns that a five-man team has been sent by Wesker to rescue them. However, the Red Queen sends Jill Valentine and Rain to hunt them down. --IMDb
User Image
Review by Crispy
Added: February 8, 2013
Ugh. Let's just get this over with.

Retribution begins right where Afterlife left off, with the good guys on the Umbrella aircraft carrier Arcadia, staring at dozens of aircraft looking to blow them to Kingdom Come. Indeed, our merry band of survivors don't stand a chance, and amidst the chaos, Alice is blown off the ship and passes out in the water. She also awakens underwater, except now she's held prisoner in an Umbrella base underneath the Russian ice. During her torturous interrogation by the brainwashed Jill Valentine, the power is suddenly cut off, allowing her to escape. She fights her way through a Tokyo simulator populated by clones, and finds herself contacted by her mortal enemy Albert Wesker. He claims he's no longer the head of Umbrella, and is in fact at war with them. For no reason whatsoever, Alice accepts this story and along with another Umbrella traitor in Wesker's employ, start moving through the compound to rendezvous with the rescue party of Leon Kennedy, Barry Burton (two more characters that Anderson has assigned the names of completely unrelated characters from the game franchise to), and Alice's sorta-fling Luther West. The whole time they are being hunted by Jill Valentine and evil clones of One, Rain and Carlos (ugh), not to mention a series of 'Biohazards'. Along the way, Alice meets a young child named Becky, who she adopts a motherly role for, and a pacifist clone of Rain (UGH).

In my Resident Evil: Afterlife review, you may recall me saying that the entry served less as a stand-alone chapter and more of a transition between parts three and five. Well, as it turns out, part five is exactly the same thing. At the end of four, the boat she's on is attacked and she's taken prisoner. This entire film is about her breaking out of said prison to join the resistance in the final battle. Which is in the sequel. And not only did they put two transitional sequels back to back, but they basically voided everything the last movie brought about. The whole focus was on Arcadia. It was destroyed before the opening credits. We brought back Claire and K-Mart and introduced Chris. Not one of them so much as seen in that opening attack. Alice began a possible romance with Luther. He gets about fifteen minutes of screen time and is unceremoniously killed with no reaction from his crush. It's just so obvious that they're not planning things out as a franchise before moving forward. Hell, it's obvious that they're barely even planning things out as individual movies. For all the talk of taking away her powers with the injection, she still seems just as super-powered as she always had. Sure, she didn't do the psychic shit anymore (which she had for a grand total of one movie, again making you wonder what the fucking point was in the first place), but she was still Matrix flipping all over the place. If you want to make her weaker to ramp the tension, you have to, you know, actually make her weaker. You can't just say it and then keep the status quo.

It's a well-known fact that when this video game franchise made the jump to the silver screen it shifted gears from horror to action/sci-fi, and as the sequels keep coming, both action and sci-fi aspects have increased exponentially. It really became distracting in the third entry, Extinction, and two movies later, it's become unbearable. The cloning angle has completely flown off the rails, and we're treated to hundreds of Alices hanging from a conveyer belt, and characters being brought back for no reason whatsoever than to reference the earlier movies. But that's all it's doing: referencing them without rhyme, reason, plot or purpose. Why? What in the world were you hoping to accomplish? Oh and we've added Las Plagas to the franchise. Actually, we added them twice. On the one hand, the Red Queen identifies them as a militant group of armed zombies, but then it's later shown to be an injected parasite (yes, a two inch creature is injected through a three to five millimeter needle. Oh ok.) that makes the infected super-powered and invincible. The obvious question of why Umbrella didn't inject the major players of its army in the first place instead of saving it for a "big finale" is predictably left unanswered. Oh and we also brought in the the Las Plagas zombies last time, but those are still unexplained and unrelated. So that brings the Las Plagas count up to three. Yeah, that makes sense. Keep up the good work guys. And despite the occasional reviews that say something along the lines of, "well, the movie was shit, but at least the action was good," I'm here to tell you that the action was just as contributing a factor in this movie sucking ass as everything else. First off, we're given the tried and true "enemies can't hit shit with an automatic weapon" trope, but he couldn't even do that right. If your heroes are in a car, and your villains have completely shot the back glass out, you can't have them miss the fucking characters. Yes, I know the bad guys' accuracy always sucks, but like everything else in this franchise, he's ramped it up to such an insane degree that it's infuriating. This isn't 1985. You're not making fucking Commando. It's 2012, and there's a reason this form of action has primarily been dropped, especially to this degree.

Acting. It sucked. Period. Every single person in front of the camera was awful. Yes, even the high-points of the previous movies, namely Colin Salmon, Michelle Rodriguez, and Boris Kodjoe, were obviously phoning it in, and who could blame them? I'm amazed Rodriguez in particular, a woman who I'm sure has no trouble finding gigs, would agree to sign up for this schlock. Anyway, the rest of the cast was just plain old-fashioned bad. Watching Milla Jovovich and Johann Urb go back and forth over whether or not saving an eight year old is worth compromising the mission in a full-fledged monotone was all but painful. With all that said, you could have had acting on par with Michael Caine and Geena Davis and it couldn't have saved this train-wreck.

Somewhere along the line, I was led to believe that Retribution served as a wrap-up to the series. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the word on the street is that they plan on moving forward with not only a sixth film, but a seventh. Why? Never mind the fact that the series is fucking abysmal at this point, but more importantly, it's obvious that they're just winging it. We can all tell you don't have a big picture planned out, so I'm begging you Paulie, please. Please wrap this nonsense up and let someone reboot this franchise in the horror mold it was always intended for. 0/10.
AttnDefDis #1: AttnDefDis - added February 14, 2013 at 5:57pm
Okay, I'm actually a fan of this franchise and I take the movies at face value. However, even I have to agree that this was a waste of a movie. Frankly, the series could have stopped at trilogy or quadrilogy and I thought for sure, this would be the last one what with the big reunion and what not, but no. This movie served absolutely no purpose and did nothing, but segue into the next film that may or may not be made. I hate stuff like that. The whole thing was just filler. Introducing new beloved characters from the game and not developing them at all before killing them off and as you said, bringing back old characters for no reason whatsoever was all pointless.

I also agree that Wesker taking away her powers was as pointless as giving them back to her because nothing changed. She's still a dead shot and flipping around like there's no tomorrow. Plus, Chris, Clair and K-Mart being completely absent and never mentioned really bothered me. Where did they go? Why weren't they on the ship being gunned down with everyone else or thrown into the water with Alice? None of it made any sense. It just served as setup for the next movie and it didn't even manage to do that well.

I will say that I disagree with you on the action and acting. I didn't have a problem with either and I thoroughly enjoyed the first sequence with the bike lock and chain. Stuff like that was great. Also, I cannot stand Michelle Rodriguez and I don't see someone with here build and/or attitude being offered roles left and right.
Sign up to add your comment. Sign up to add your comment.
Recommended Movies
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter Resident Evil: Afterlife Resident Evil Resident Evil: Extinction Resident Evil: Apocalypse Dead Trigger Underworld: Awakening Assassin's Creed Doom Biohazard 4D: Executer Mad Max: Fury Road Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials AVP: Alien vs. Predator Maze Runner: The Death Cure Death Race Monster Hunter Venom Resident Evil: Damnation
Layout, reviews and code © 2000-2024 | Privacy Policy
Contact: Join us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter Review Updates