Well…One can only hope that this is the last chapter. If you thought both the Underworld and xXx franchises were running on fumes, then you’ve seen nothing yet as the Resident Evil series reaches its sixth and (hopefully) final instalment. The Resident Evil video games are some of the best survival horror games ever made and brilliantly inventive and creative with their characters, stories and situations, which is a shame that hack-director Paul W. S. Anderson had to go and cause chaos with his movie “adaptations” since 2002, with each one getting progressively worse and worse, so you can probably tell where this one ranks in terms of worse to “best”. In fact, not only is this the worst in the franchise or the worst video game movie to date, but also quite possibly one of the worst movies ever made.
Everything in the movie fails across the board, and even though the previous movies established lore, it keeps getting ignored or retconned as they go along and this movie completely ignores all the important lore and backstory, as if Anderson was deliberately ignoring all the criticism and feedback he received. They even sideline Shawn Roberts’ Wesker in favour of resurrecting Iain Glen’s Dr. Isaacs due to Glen’s Game of Thrones popularity. Oh, and enough with the clones already! There are more holes in this plot than there are in many Swiss cheeses and logic is completely thrown out the window in favour of a something that has no signs of a plot or story structure in its body and even the action is completely devoid of tension.
The combination of cinematography and editing are utter garbage; everything looks dull and bland thanks to its pukey-brown/blue colour tint, whilst the editing is some of the worst seen in a movie yet. The film is incredibly littered with jump-cuts that you literally can’t take a breath or concentrate on what you are looking at, and add on to that the innocuous shaky-cam during the action sequences, it creates an uncomfortable movie-viewing experience. Occasionally, during the action sequences you don’t notice its horrific editing, but that’s only because some of those scenes are shot in complete darkness so you can’t see what’s happening and the muzzle-flashes will just leave you blinded and sick to your stomach. Plus, having random jump-scares doesn’t make it scary in any way possible.
Just as bad is the CGI, which looks even worse than the CGI seen in the likes of Gods of Egypt or the last Divergent movie and makes the graphics in a PS1/PS2 game look state-of-the-art. The music is generic filler action music that you’d skip over on a soundtrack, which is a shame considering that some of the music in previous movies had some solid tracks thanks to the likes of Marilyn Manson or tomandandy. As far as the acting talent is concerned, everyone frankly looks as though they have all just stopped caring and just want to collect their pay cheques and call it a day. It’s a real shame that Milla Jovovich went from being such a promising rising talent in The Fifth Element to just being a prisoner of her own husband’s movies.
In the end, it’s truly astonishing just how lazy and manipulative the filmmaking in this movie is, as if nobody cared or even bothered to put in any real effort. This could potentially be the final nail in the coffin for Paul W. S. Anderson’s career as a director, and any shred of talent they may have had in the previous movies is completely discarded, which only results in the worst instalment of a drawn-out, mediocre franchise that should’ve ended a long time ago. It really will be hard to find a film worse than this in 2017 since this is right down there with the equally abominable Fifty Shades Darker in terms of how much can something truly stink more than a very stinky thing indeed.
RESIDENT EVIL: THE FINAL CHAPTER / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: PAUL W. S. ANDERSON / STARRING: MILLA JOVOVICH, ALI LARTER, SHAWN ROBERTS, RUBY ROSE / RELEASE DATE: 12TH JUNE
