Resident Evil: Retribution

[DanielNash 11]

Even though they're kind of a punchline in themselves, I have to admit I have a soft spot for the Resident Evil series. They don't put the most thought into story, plot, or generally making sense, but they're usually a hell of a good time (and much easier to swallow if you think of each movie as an episode in an ongoing serial, and not a standalone product).

 

That was until I saw the fifth movie, Retribution, in the theater this fall. Somehow, in a series that has made more and more money with each sequel, this movie manages to look like it had a production budget of about $50. The plot is off-the-wall bonkers: this is a movie where things happen just because, with nary an earned plot development in sight. During scenes in the middle of the movie, I wondered why everything was taking so long; by the time the credits rolled, I wondered why the movie had only felt 20 minutes long. Such was the magic of this movie's shittiness.

 

A rich and pulsing vein of WTF.

[PlanBFromOuterSpace 3138]

Speaking of things happening "just because", this movie has one of my favorite supernatural action horror movie cliches: Bullets never work...until they do. See also: End of Days. Anyway, yeah, there's this big monstrous thing in this movie that they probably pop about a thousand rounds into, and none of it has any effect, until of course Milla Jovovich does one of her bullshit gymkata (the skill of gymnastics, the kill of karate!) tricks where she jumps over the thing and puts a bullet in the head, and it stays down...for a while anyway.

 

Speaking of which, I'd forgotten that the bad guy had de-powered her until the end when he gives her another shot and says "There, you've got your powers back". Am I wrong, or was she doing JUST as much stupid crazy shit in the meantime? This was just a stupid, stupid fucking movie.

[RyanSz 3140]

I've seen all but the second movie in theaters, and it wasn't until the forth one that I checked out when it came to story/plot. Everyone is a zombie or a strugling survivor, there are no consumers but for some reason this company is still designing new zombies/monsters trying to kill the survivors.

 

Then you have the fifth movie that was built around a "shocking revelation" which I thought was going to be that the previous three movies were all a simulation that started after Alice was taken from the mansion, but instead it's just that there are a lot of clones and Wesker had somehow survived a nuclear explosion happening two feet in front of him. I would have loved to see how he survived, especially when they had that awesome shot in the opening credit showing what happened after the end of the fourth movie.

 

I agree that Alice has a one shot kill cheat code on because I don't think I've seen her miss a shot or a shot that didn't kill almost everything. Plus, what has happened to the little girl from the second movie? Is she supposed to be back in the final movie with Chris and Claire?

[PlanBFromOuterSpace 3138]

If i didn't get to see movies for free, I would have given up on watching this series a long time ago, as the second film is one of the absolute worst things that I've ever seen in a theater. It doesn't help that in whatever universe this movie takes place in that Milla Jovovich is supposed to be the coolest person ever, because her shitty acting plus the shitty script makes her one of the lousiest and most anti-charismatic (I'm talking nearly Lautner-level here) protagonists I've ever seen. Oh, and did you know that "They were dead...but they didn't stay dead"? Because that line makes it into EVERY trailer and every opening of every film in the series. Anyone that's seen this particular installment knows that I'm telling the truth when I say that this one in particular is quite LITERALLY a video game movie! Ugh, this thing was such a fucking chore to watch, but SO fun to talk about.

[DeathToMikeyBay 130]

When I recommend a bad movie for this podcast, not just any bad movie will do. It has to be a bad movie that makes you constantly ask WHY?

 

Resident Evil: Retribution is one such movie.

 

The first one was an okay B movie. Every sequel has been a string of action movies so cliche that they become self-parody.

 

Resident Evil: Retribution manages to be even stupider.

 

If the first movie was Return of the Living Dead, then Retribution would be Return of the Living Dead 5: Rave to Grave.

 

 

Nothing makes sense. The following is a SPOILER summary. As an added bonus to how insane this movie is, 10% of this summary will be insane things I just made up off the top of my head. No one will be able to tell this from the actual plot.

 

SPOILER

.

 

 

 

The movie opens with the aftermath of the battle against ospreys from the end of the previous movie. It is then played back in reverse slow motion. The umbrella soldiers are now Nazi stormtroopers who jump from the helicopters to shoot the prisoners, shoot nets to catch the prisoners, then shoot the prisoners who were shots with nets. Zombie dogs jump from helicopters to attack people. Alice shoots down a chopper with pennies. When it reaches the start of the battle, it plays back normally so you get to watch it a second time.

 

Alice wakes up in a house. Her husband and daughter are having breakfast. The parents both talk to the daughter and communicate with sign language, and she both talks to them while signing. She's deaf yet speaks near perfect English?

 

Zombies break into the house and attack. What follows is almost a shot for shot remake of the opening to the Dawn of the Dead remake. A woman who looks exactly like Michelle Rodriguez from the first movie gives her a ride but crashes. They flee to a house. The daughter hides in a closet but Alice gets killed.

 

Alice wakes up in a bright Umbrella logo room. Jill Valentine from the previous movie nearly has her tits out with a robot spider on her cleavage. She asks Alice why she betrayed Umbrella then blasts her with a sonic weapon. This happens about 5 times. Then the power goes out and the door opens.

 

Alice escapes but the computer reboots. She walks through a door to outdoor Tokyo. Zombies begin attacking everyone and she flees back the way she came. There is a 10 minute slo motion fight where she kills all the Tokyo zombies with a bicycle lock.

 

She goes to a control room where everyone is dead but Ada Wong shows up. Then Wesker shows up on a monitor and says it's part of the plan to rescue Alice. They're in Umbrella's testing arctic underground test facility in Russia where they run zombie attack tests in recreations of the world's cities, all so they can use the footage for sales brochures to world governments. A rescue team shows up on the surface, comprised of every other Resident Evil character who has not yet made an appearance in the movies. They head into the facility but set bombs for 2 hours, the exact running time left in the movie, proclaiming that everything has to be over by then.

 

Oh yeah "the Red Queen" little girl computer AI from the first movie is now running Umbrella. She sends two giant hammer zombies after them in the Tokyo area.

 

The rescue team heads through the base's sub pens, passing the Red October. They shoot umbrella stormtroopers in what is a near exact recreation of the sub base from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

 

Alice and Ada head into the "Suburbia" level. It's the neighborhood from her dream. They totally have time to stop at her house. She finds the dead body of her housewife self. She goes to the closet her "daughter" hid in, and a zombie meter maid pops out. Alice kills it with a broken off parking meter. Then the daughter shows up for more verbal sign language. Ada explains that they use clones with implanted memories for the simulations, and that there are thousands of Alice and daughter clones.

 

Stormtroopers, Jill, and evil clones of all the good guys from the first movie attack them. Ada sees a rocket fired at her and has time to shoot out a circle in the floor to drop down 3 feet to avoid the explosion. Alice, who can shoot the pupils out of a person from 100 yards while doing backflips, never catches on to shoot the giant robot spider obviously controlling Jill, even after knowing from the previous movie that the robot spiders brainwash people.

 

The rescue team arrives at the "Moscow" level. They are attacked by "Las Plagas", who are a bunch of zombie stormtroopers with guns driving Road Warrior vehicles. They have to hold out until a guy can fiddle with a laptop to find a way out, which turns out to be going out the back of the store they're holed up in.

 

Alice and the hearing deaf girl arrive at the fake Moscow subway. Michelle Rodriguez clone from the housewife dream shows up. They don't trust her because another clone of her is one of the bad guys chasing them. She doesn't want to use a gun because her clone memories "marched against the NRA". Alice forces her to shoot a gun. "Now you're a badass."

 

The CGI monster from the first movie eats the laptop guy. Bullets don't hurt it, but Alice shows up in a neon undercarriage lit techno car while both diegetic and non-diegetic techno music start pumping. They get into a Road Warrior chase with the Plagas zombies. The girl has to grab stray shotgun shells from the hood, just like Road Warrior. They crash back into the fake Moscow subway where Michelle Rodriguez good clone immediately announces she wants to fuck the entire rescue team.

 

They get back to the sub pens and hop onto the elevator they came in on. The computer shuts off power to the elevator. The possibility of this happening never occurred to them in a base where the computer controls everything (except locking any of the many doors they've gone through).

 

The CGI monster shows up, snaps Michelle Rodriguez good clone's s neck, and runs off with the faux deaf daughter. Then Jill, Michelle Rodriguez evil clone and all the other evil clones of the first movie's characters show up to shoot them. Alice announces she has to go down the elevator shaft of the self destructing base to rescue the little girl that the monster grabbed. She uses the librarian glasses and grappling hook that Ada gave her to find the little girl, who has been cocooned inside an egg pod because it wasn't already ENOUGH of a ripoff to the end of Aliens. Alice does a flip and shoots 3 bullets at the licker, which is 2% of the number shot at it before yet these manage to kill it. She tears deaf faker girl out of the egg pod cocoon.

 

Barry from the rescue team is having a shootout with Jill and the evil clones. The clones bring out Ada as a hostage and tell Barry to surrender. Barry lights a cigar and steps out to be shot, but it was part of his plan to have the force of hundreds of bullets tearing into him knock the gun out of his hand, do a bunch of slo mo spins in the air, and fall back down to his hand so he can shoot one of the clones before dying.

 

The bombs go off and flood the base. Two rescue team dudes, Alice, and Not Newt are driving away when the Red October bursts out of the ice. Jill, evil Michelle Rodriguez, and Ada come out. Everyone sits there as evil Michelle Rodriguez clone injects herself with las plagas, which causes her to regenerate any wound instead of becoming a Road Warrior zombie. Alice takes out two machetes from nowhere to fight Jill and her blade staff. Evil Michelle Rodriguez clone fights the rescue dudes. There are no less than half a dozen Mortal Kombat bone breaking xray attack shots. Alice and Jill flip each other in the middle of mid air flips. Jill holds Alice's head up to their snow mobile's treads, which start up on their own for absolutely no reason. Alice finally figures out to yank off the robot spider from Jill's tits. Alice gets her entire sternum xray shattered by evil Michelle Rodriguez clone, so she shoots out the ice where hundreds of underwater zombies drag evil Michelle Rodriguez clone down into the water.

 

A helicopter picks them up and takes them to capitol hill in Washington D.C. The seemingly dead villain from the previous movies, Wesker is now the president of the United States. He super speed runs up to Alice to inject her with the T virus to give her the magic powers from the third movie back. He says the red queen computer is out to wipe out all humans and takes her outside. For some reason it's the White House now and they pull back to reveal a warzone with a concrete wall holding back thousands of zombies while dragons fly around attacking helicopters.

 

 

Can you tell which 10% I made up? Does it matter? THIS MOVIE IS INSANE.