Resident Evil: Retribution (2012) Reviews

• Should be titled Resident Evil: Boss Battles

  m-a-elsewhere2013-02-03

  PREMISE: Alice. Kills stuff. PLOT: Alice. Kills stuff. Viewers hoping for a coherent narrative are advised to try Capcom's Resident Evil cartoons; viewers completely new to the series really have no choice but to let the images simply break over them like tsunamis. Despite 2 or 3 pages of exposition, series writer/director Paul W. S. Anderson clearly assumes that anyone rejoining him at this point is so familiar with both the movies and the various R.E./BIOHAZARD VGs that new characters (Ada Wong; Leon Kennedy) can be ported over from the games, and old characters (Rain; Carlos) resurrected without explanation (Jill Valentine, Albert Wesker and Luther West are back; Claire and Chris Redfield make cameos). Happily, I AM that geekish, so enjoyed the merry-go-round. The CGI FX, which are virtually non-stop, are more varied, energetic, and original than in previous sequels. No more mutant dead dogs, thank goodness, although Anderson remains overly-fond of his tentacles- bursting-out-of-the-mouth shots. The movie is less a script than a series of levels, as Alice, Project Alice, Leon, Ada and their ad hoc teams are dragged through artificial environments adapted from previous installments, from games (notably the new Manhattan and Moscow sets), from any spin-off that isn't bolted to the ground, even from absolutely unconnected franchises (e.g. DAWN OF THE DEAD). Each setting—all controlled by The Red Queen--has its own horde of character clones infected with different strains of the T-Virus and/or Plaga Parasite and its own boss monster adapted from one or another of the games. If...and only if...that paragraph made the least bit of sense, then this movie's recommended.

• The extreme worst of all Resident Evil series

  jsoetandi2012-09-13

  I love Resident Evil series. Despite the mediocre reviews it gets in the past, I still go to the cinema on its release and always looking forward for the next sequel. But RE5 fails beyond believe. The storyline is utterly crap. The action are cheesy, the actors are cheesy, the whole movie is a joke to the RE series. I am completely disappointed at how the whole movie turns out to be. *spoiler alert* The whole movie is set on one giant Umbrella underwater laboratory and Alice and friends is trying to break out of it. Along the way they encounter some zombies and finally got out. And that's literally about the summary of the whole story! They try to use music to intensify everything.. but it becomes very cheesy. Especially towards the end before the final fight when Jill walks out of the submarine. The Red Queen is total crap. Cheesy, stupid.. The fighting scene itself is very cheesy and unrealistic. They hardly get hit by a bullet even when they were standing in open view. But it seems like their bullet always managed to hit the enemy. Even the one bullet that hit Alice, didn't even do her much harm. What a load of crap. At the final fight, it was obvious some of them had had their bones cracked. But they were still standing and fighting as if their bone is not really a necessary part of their body. They look pretty healthy for someone with broken bone! When Alice beats Jill.. it was so obvious from the beginning that that's what needs to be done. But the scriptwriter must've made Alice so dumb that she did not realize that from the beginning. Sadly, the viewers are not as dumb as the scriptwriter. And on the final scene when Leon touches Ada's thigh.. THATS AS CHEESIEST AS IT COULD GET! I could almost cry looking at that scene. What the f... *sigh* I apologize for using a lot of "cheesy" word in my review. But it is exactly how I feel when I see it. It's like a bunch of amateurs movie makers trying to make action movie. All in all, I wouldn't even rate it 5 for effort. Its a total lazy movie writing. I still want to see RE6, but I seriously hope they do not FAIL as big as this one. What a load of crap this movie is.

• It was different…

  imdb020-643-1297722012-09-16

  Well… this movie is like a game. Watching this movie is like watching a kid playing one level of video game. But you're watching this during 1.5 hours. During first 15 minutes of the movie I had only one thought in my mind: "what a hell is this?" There is no plot, no catchy story like in previous parts. Here you have several blocks and a lot of stupid shooting and fighting without a hint to be a bit realistic. The final fight is like a raping of your mind - too much FX's, too less reality and common sense, it's against everything good in the world. Actors are great. After a deadly injury a character doesn't show any sight of the pain except in his words. Dialogs in the movie are fantastic… If you'll write down all the lines of all characters, you'll hardly fill 1.5 pages A4 size. Watching this movie a felt like I'm fooled - creators didn't want to work to make it interesting, they used CGI+FX+fighting+shooting without everything else that makes movie worthwhile, and sold it to me using a bright wrap. People were leaving the movie theatre in the middle of this picture. Hope next movie will be much better.

• Absolute crap

  dtander-12012-09-14

  I really liked the first ResEvil movie, and I've been going along with them ever since, but this is the end of the line for me. This movie was a total waste of time and money. There's no plot, just a situation that Alice has to fight her way out of. There are some good stunts but nothing we haven't seen before. Most of the action is just ridiculous...bad guys that don't die, guns that don't run out of ammo, characters that can be interchangeably good or evil at the whim of the scriptwriter. It's like a five-year-old playing with toy soldiers. The actors are so wooden, and look so plastic that I honestly couldn't tell if they were CGI creations or actual human beings. Milla and her husband should be ashamed of themselves.

• A 2 hour video game cut scene

  nwsts2012-09-13

  Not sure if this movie is only for videogamers, but I can't see anyone else caring to sit through it. The movie made it quite clear, early on, that there would be no complicated plot lines or character development. And the dialogue was equally simplistic. The lines sounded something like this - go to the 3rd mountain and collect 20 coins and 3 golden power boosters. One quickly sensed this was not a movie at all, rather a simple video game cut scene. Also problematical were the incredibly goofy scenes with thousands of bullets aimed point blank at the heroes and all of them missing. It just takes all of the fun out of a movie when there is absolutely no sense of danger to the heroes. On the plus side, the action sequences were very well shot and the cgi was first class. That said, it just wasn't enough to make this reviewer glad to be sitting in the audience