In Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident
Evil: The Final Chapter he brings his six-film franchise to a suitably
nonsense end. It started back in 2002 as a humble little sci-fi horror film,
loosely adapting the video game of the same name into a high-tech haunted house
movie with the final girl (Milla Jovovich) dodging death traps and zombies in
an underground bunker. By now, though, it has piled up a rococo tangle of
double crosses, conspiracies, and surprise twists involving: the evil Umbrella
corporation’s machinations, a revolving door ensemble of action ciphers,
endless mutated monsters, and a host of clone bodies enabling any and every
character to die horrible deaths only to pop up later as the “real” one (for
the moment). It’s a heck of thing to track, but luckily the latest installment
not only attempts to bring the whole unwieldy B-movie mythos to some sort of
conclusion, but also once again provides a quick recap at the beginning.
Maybe it’s the pessimistic mood of being in the midst of a
national breakdown, but a movie about the apocalypse that attempts to bring
some order to its chaos is a welcome sight. Anderson reveals the bombed-out
zombie pandemic was no mistake. It was an Umbrella corporation plot to bring
about the end of the world in order to have the monopoly on whatever came
after. This means Jovovich’s Alice fought her way out of their bunker all those
years ago only to belatedly realize the baddies had a cure there all along. Now
she must drive and shoot and kick and punch and slice her way back to where it
all began, in search of the glowing green MacGuffin vial that’ll heal the
world. It’s a pretty neat U-turn of plotting, and an acknowledgement that the
movies’ game-inspired levels and bosses are still endlessly and
self-consciously modeled after the iterative nature of working through levels.
They are the same techniques and same models in recombined sets and motifs.
It’s familiar and obvious, with some fresh new twists. This one has a flaming
barrel of gasoline flung by trebuchet into a mass of zombies chasing a Death Race tank. That’s not nothing.
Like every Resident
Evil Anderson directed (all but two), this is an exercise in nutty genre
plotting only insofar as it is an excuse to create stunning spaces – he’s
always at his best working out architecture and symmetrical labyrinths in which
to stage his gore – and stare in awe as Jovovich flips through a series of
tough tumbles and scary scrapes. She’s a cool hero befitting the icy somber
silliness on display. The only real problem is the movie’s retcon contortions
and late-breaking stabs for emotional character development in what’s otherwise
been a self-amused vacuous pit of clones and CG beasties endlessly replicable.
They drain the weightless chopping and shooting of its insubstantial panache.
Why overly and overtly stress the story when the series has always been merely
a treadmill of plot, perpetually moving but never seeming to get much of
anywhere? This is far from Anderson’s best work, or even the best Resident Evil. It cuts too quickly to
savor the striking spasms and spaces. But his consistent commitment to
lightning-fast B-movie trash is admirable. Passable fun is seeing a truck outrace
a mutant pterodactyl, or finding our heroine hung upside down off a crumbling
overpass spinning and kicking at her assailants. Less fun is tearfully considering
which clone is the real original person and how it all ties into a possible contrived
panacea.
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