Weird Wednesdays: Resident Evil: Retribution

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

A genre franchise which peaks after several installments is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, there's the satisfaction of watching a knee-deep sequel and appreciating the lineage of techniques, obsessions, and images which compound and coalesce to create such a satisfying experience. On the other, there's the thankless job of spending every conversation proselytizing movies no person in their right mind would sit down with off the bat – “Scanners III is really great,” “Saw VI is the good one actually,” or in this case “oh, you should just watch Resident Evil: Retribution. Yeah, that's the fifth one. Where are you going?”

Nonetheless, my quest to evangelize moviegoers into the cult of Paul W.S. Anderson’s brain-bending live-action video-game cinema saga marches ever forward. Specifically, it's 2012’s Retribution which sits atop the heap and hoards 10% of my brain’s obsessive processing power at any given moment; occupying more space than my ability to remember loved ones’ birthdays, but less than, say, my ability to feed myself. As far as fixations go, you could certainly do worse. Over a decade after release, Resident Evil: Retribution stands as a highbrow-lowbrow jewel of digital popcorn cinema nonsense: embracing the unreal both textually and technically; proving itself both absurd and absurdly entertaining. Welcome to Alice in IMAXland.

To tee up the full timeline of storytelling which leads to Retribution is a fool’s errand – the Resident Evil movies, based loosely on the sci-horror-action games of the same name, become very complex very fast. By the third entry there’s already psychic powers, clones, and enough absurdity to fill seven films; not to mention the retcons and rewrites and recaps and so on. Thankfully, Retribution does away with delusions of “narrative” and “logic” and strips the franchise down to bare bones. Here our ass-kicking, dual-wielding, super-soldier protag Alice (the iconic Milla Jovovich) finds herself trapped in a series of test environments which she must traverse to escape: easy, uncomplicated, and to the point.

It's through this dirt-simple premise which Resident Evil: Retribution twists and transcends out of simple sequel territory to become both eye-popping absurdity and one of the best video game movies of all time. It's not that Retribution faithfully adapts the material of a game – quite the opposite, in fact – but that the film is structured like one; conveys the same maximal, overperformed emotions as one; even delivers information like one. After a franchise recap and, generously, six minutes of exposition, Retribution launches into a non-stop barrage of setpiece after setpiece; reveling in maxed-out digitally tweaked fight scenes with just enough talk between to tee up the next ass-kicking. As Alice moves from environment to environment, checking her mini-map and receiving power-ups, the viewer moves from level to level, all but holding the controller.

On a metatextual level, the movie becomes something of a reflexive commentary on games in total – what does it mean for a character with multiple lives (in this case, clones) to exist in these rendered, controlled worlds, and what does it mean when they finally break free of that structure? If you're rolling these thoughts in your head, well… you're already doing more media studies work than director Paul W.S. Anderson, who by his own admittance creates movies to make people “cheer in the theater.” But on that basic, reptile-brain pleasure response level as well, Retribution is a smashing success. In terms of sheer entertainment value, the film stands heads and shoulder above its predecessors with moment after moment engineered to just look and feel really, really fucking cool, dude – something I’d saddle up with the likes of Underworld and Aeon Flux as part of the quintessential “preteen boy sleepover” canon.

Resident Evil: Retribution is the apex predator of that dumb (said lovingly), crowd-pleasing brand of “hot women with guns” cinema. As mentioned, there's barely a plot, barely context, and barely anything beyond the most necessary archetypes to make a film like this work. It stretches the idea of conventional narrative cinema so far beyond the boundary of taste that it warps into a Moebius strip of latex-clad women shooting assault weapons, forever. Even the adrenaline-pumping setpieces are by and large remixes and perfections of iconic moments from previous movies, both subverting expectations and building new ground from familiar territory. Sometimes it just rocks to get a “greatest hits” from your favorite films, but combined with the dizzying meta non-narrative, it all feels like a star collapsing and going supernova in a dazzling display of CGI fireworks. The sixth film, Final Chapter, felt like a tremendous disappointment after Retribution because the snake had already eaten its own tail – there was nothing left to consume.

I won't go on. I can, and will, talk about Resident Evil: Retribution at embarrassing length. My last point of interest is the performances – my god, the performances. As if Jovovich’s steely-eyed badass Alice wasn't enough, we get two of cinema’s greatest scene-chewers turning out for this entry: Sienna Guillory, as co-badass Jill Valentine here brainwashed into a hammy, line-barking GI Joe villainess, and Shawn Roberts as the eminent corporate baddie Albert Wesker. Shawn Roberts in particular is a monolith within this franchise. Though he appears in no more than eight minutes of Retribution’s runtime, his over-enunciated, action-figure performance steals the show so completely that he's often the number one element I obsess over. Among the many, many crazy shots of this film, there's a single frame in which he appears that’s so titanic in audacity I would print it out sixteen by nine feet to hang in my living space for all eternity. Iconic, unbelievable stuff. 

Lest my analysis confuse you into thinking Retribution is a smart film, don't be fooled. It's an exceedingly dumb film made by a smart filmmaker; one who excels in his purpose of making his wife look as cool as possible. The married duo of Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich tear through this movie like the greatest love story never filmed; listen to the commentary track and you'll see how much is predicated on how awesome they think it looks when Milla whips her wet hair around, or how cool it is when she blasts through zombies in slo-mo bullet time. Maybe Retribution’s greatest appeal is in its delightful sincerity and clarity of purpose – in a world of Marvel quips and blockbuster slop wearing the skin of artistic integrity, it's refreshing to experience something so unpretentious and so unconcerned with being anything more than it is. Sometimes you just want to watch a hot woman swing a bike chain around like it's fucking Castlevania… and sometimes that's the best thing in the world.