Resident Evil: Retribution

I have a friend who lives down by the South Side, who will often take a 45 minute trek up to where I live so we can hang out. He does this without complaint, and this week I decided to return to favor by coming down to him. He suggested we go see a movie, which was fine by me. He looked up what was playing, and gave me three options.

One of the movies I'd already seen, and the second I had zero interest in seeing, so that left the third one, Resident Evil: Retribution. I had mixed feelings about that, but I was in the mood for a movie, and it was the only thing that I was even remotely interested in seeing.

I think a good way to describe Retribution would be to say that it's an fairly good example of how a poor director can single-handedly destroy a film. During the movie, my friend commented to me "Couldn't they find any good actors for this movie?" I said back that I recognized many of the actors in this film, and had seen them in other projects, and they're not bad actors. The problem was that they were receiving bad direction, making their performances flat and wooden.

I can't call myself an expert on this sort of thing, but I have done a bit of (community theater level) acting, so I can say with some confidence that the performance and actor gives is the result of a number of factors, and the instructions given to him by the director are a large part of that, especially if the director is the tyrannical sort who micro-manages every aspect of a performance. I don't know if Paul W.S. Anderson is that type of director, but there must have been some sort of creative control being exerted on set to explain the performances I saw in this film. Also telling, the best performance of the movie was handed in by star Mila Jovovich, who just happens to be married to the director. I'm guessing she was given more free reign in her acting.

The script was also weak and tumescent. I was going to say that the blame can't fall fully on director Anderson's lap for that, until I checked IMDb and saw that he's credited as the screenwriter. So nevermind my attempt to spread the blame, it's all Anderson's fault. I guess the movie had a plot, in that there were a series of events which occurred in chronological order. Except for the opening credits, which for some bizarre reason was the ending of the third movie, run backwards and in slow motion.

There were two things about the plot/narration that got me. Anderson doesn't seem to have grasped subtle ideas like "Show, Don't Tell," so large chunks of the movie were literally characters looking directly at the screen and explaining what was happening to the audience. It was ok, if clumsily done, in the opening when Alice (Jovovich) was catching the audience up on the events of the last three movies. What got me, though, was when the main bad guy of the movie, an evil computer AI that looked like a young girl with a British accent, explained to the viewers exactly what she was doing whenever the action cut to a different set of characters. I guess he was trying to make it look like the girl was issuing orders, but instead it looked like she was talking to herself. Especially since everything she said was also written on the screen as she said it.

And as a quick side note, how cliched can you get in your bad guy character? Anderson managed to cram Creepy Child, A.I. Is A Crapshoot, and Evil Brit into one package. Me, I would have kept going. Given the girl an Evil Laugh while she slouches in an easy chair stroking a kitty cat.

The other thing about the plot that confused me is the way it's paced. The movie felt like it was supposed to be a lot shorter than it was. My thought was that Anderson had come up with this as the movie's first act, and then after a couple months, realized he had nothing else, so he stretched that one act out into three.

Then there were the costumes. Now, I'm not going to claim I am offended by the sight of sexy women jumping around in revealing clothing. On the contrary. And I know that having said sexy women in movies tends to increase ticket sales. But there's eye candy, and then there's pandering. Some of it I could kinda understand; Alice didn't choose the outfit she's running around in, she just grabbed the first clothes she found. Why someone had specifically laid that bondage gear out for her is another matter, and one I'd rather not inspect too closely.

And then there's the outfit Ada Wong is wearing in the movie. Ok, I get it, that's what she wore in the fourth game. But am I really supposed to believe that when setting out for a rescue mission, she decided to wear a cocktail dress? That's like if I put on a tuxedo to go bail a friend out of jail.

As for Jill Valentine's clothing, she looks like Zero Suit Samus. So much that I have to wonder if it was done on purpose. And here's a disturbing though I just had: she was put in that outfit by a computer AI who looks like a ten-year-old girl. That's just wrong.

So, in conclusion, don't bother seeing Resident Evil: Retribution. As I said to another friend earlier today, "sexy women in hot clothing is not enough to excuse the rest of the film." Also, there wasn't a whole lot of Retribution going on in the film. It's rarely a good sign when the film's title is a random assemblage of words.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights