Resident Evil: The Final Chapter - Just Stay Dead

The live-action Resident Evil movies have always been some of my guilty pleasures, next to Sucker Punch and Elektra. All of the Resident Evil films are definitely flawed, ridiculous, and violent, but they’re fun to say the least (except for Retribution, which is just dumb). It’s actually amazing for the franchise to reach its sixth installment after 15 years, and now that The Final Chapter is here, does the series still have some life left in it, or will it finally die until someone “resuscitates” it with a reboot?

The live-action Resident Evil movies have always been some of my guilty pleasures, next to Sucker Punch and Elektra. All of the Resident Evil films are definitely flawed, ridiculous, and violent, but they’re fun to say the least (except for Retribution, which is just dumb). It’s actually amazing for the franchise to reach its sixth installment after 15 years, and now that The Final Chapter is here, does the series still have some life left in it, or will it finally die until someone “resuscitates” it with a reboot?

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter picks up three weeks after the events of Retribution, and we find Alice (Milla Jovovich) alone in Washington, D.C., in the aftermath of Albert Wesker’s (Shawn Roberts) betrayal after leading her and fellow survivors Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb), and Ada Wong (Li Bingbing) to the White House, humanity’s “last stand,” to seemingly fend off the horde of zombies and bioweapons. Then the Red Queen (Ever Gabo Anderson) appears and tells Alice to return to the Hive in Raccoon City within 48 hours to release an airborne antivirus to finally rid the earth of the T-Virus before the last survivors get wiped out.

Oh my. Where do I begin?

First off, what the hell happened to the three more iconic characters I mentioned above? Alice is alone in what remains of the White House, and the whole place is in complete shambles. Did Paul W.S. Anderson kill them off-screen? The movie didn’t even acknowledge these characters until the end; they were simply ignored. It’s obvious, though, that this happened and the actors were not invited back due to financial reasons. I guess the production is maintaining a certain amount of budget to pull this off, but it’s still disappointing to just sweep these characters under the rug.

The script is one incoherent mess, and the twists were just shoehorned, ignoring some plot points from Apocalypse and Retribution and further creating more plot holes. Actually, all six films’ scripts are incoherent, and even if you try to watch them all back to back, they still feel disjointed and suffer loads of continuity errors despite all these scripts being written by one person throughout the series. It’s like Anderson thought, “let’s just pretend these never happened and put new characters and loads of bombastic action in the new movie. Yay.”

By the way, what’s the deal with Alice’s powers? I thought they were injected back into her in Retribution when Albert Wesker puts the T-Virus back inside Alice. She may have superhuman tolerance to pain, but her other abilities like her telekinesis were gone. Also, when the movie reveals Umbrella’s motives behind the apocalypse, it’s very silly, and the evil corporation was reduced to a bunch of elitist nutjobs. Ugh. I don’t know anymore.

One common complaint I noticed is the editing. At first, I want to give it a chance because the promotional clips may be edited that way to avoid giving a lot away, but apparently, I’m going to agree with the reviews that The Final Chapter is edited so bad that my eyes got tired of watching at some points in the movie.

Action sequences were edited so fast with rapid-fire cuts that I can barely register what’s going on. It’s like they were edited by someone with a short attention span, or the editor was jacked on steroids when he worked on this movie; it’s insane. I feel like the Ludovico technique from A Clockwork Orange is being applied on me, with my eyes propped open as the barrage of nonsensical violence go on. How can I even have fun if I can barely see what’s going on? The shaky camera also didn’t help as it made the action look worse; the filmmakers may have thought a lot about the Jason Bourne films and got too inspired by the shaky-camera approach.

Jump scares were also prominent especially during the first act to retain the horror element of the film, but come on, battering us with them will not make the film scarier than the fact that it’s not scary.

For the characters, they are all making stupid choices here to set up the action scenes, even Alice. It’s her fault she keeps ending up caught in Umbrella’s traps. She should have died in so many scenarios, but luckily, the writer’s on her side.

The supporting characters are also cannon fodder throughout. I don’t even care when they died; I’m just excited to see how they die, but thanks to the editing, I can’t even appreciate the deaths because I can’t see them well. Even when one character is given a “dramatic” death involving turbine fans and surprisingly dramatic music, I never gave a damn about that character due to the almost nonexistent character development. But hey, it’s Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil! Since when did he give a crap about characters?

Claire Redfield (Ali Larter) and Wesker were also treated like crap here. Wesker was reduced to a henchman for Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen) while Claire is reduced to almost a footnote since the spotlight is on Alice. Okay, I get that Alice is the face of the whole series, but seriously, Claire scarcely did anything here. She wasn’t even given a proper sendoff in the ending.

One redeeming quality here is Milla Jovovich. She still has the physicality and the charisma to kick some human, undead, and bioweapon ass. She definitely had fun portraying a powerful and now iconic action heroine; it just sucks that the writing behind the character is too messy. Iain Glen also had a blast being the villainous Dr. Isaacs while Ali Larter did what she could to help Claire emerge as a character of her own though the script treats her as Alice's "supportive best friend" with an unmemorable stint throughout the movie.

In its last breath, The Final Chapter went all out with the action, twists, and gore. It definitely embraced the empty, illogical, over-the-top, and bombastic action route. I know what I signed up for before I watched the damn movie, but I still ended up frustrated and exhausted because of its bad editing and cinematography. Seriously, at some points of the film, I just want to close my eyes and rest them for a while.

Resident Evil, you were fun, but you had your run; It’s time to put the final nail in your coffin and just stay dead.

RATING: 2/5