Colette Arrand

Tag: Screen Gems

  • Movie Review: Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

    Movie Review: Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

    Like a video game character bestowed the gift of an infinite lives cheat code, Milla Jovovich‘s Alice, the hero of the incredibly long-running Resident Evil franchise, cannot die. Yes, the Umbrella Corporation, her faceless nemesis, has killed her several times, but Alice, she keeps coming back. Why? It’s impossible to say. At this point, she’s saving a world that was effectively ended several films ago. The Umbrella Corporation are the ones to blame, of course, but their motives are also unclear. If their aim was profit, at least one sane individual in the boardroom would’ve pointed out that killing the entire human race was bad for business. If they want merely to kill Alice, then perhaps that same sane person should point out the benefits of not cloning, reviving, and granting superpowers to their otherwise dead and powerless enemy. It’s a fruitless, twisted war the two fight. Sometimes, extra lives are a curse.

    Resident Evil: Retribution offers no relief for either party. Instead, it shuffles the deck chairs before a presumable final encounter between humanity and the rogue biomedical corporation hellbent on its (and its own) destruction. It wisely figures that not everybody has seen the four previous Resident Evil movies and recaps them to the point where the last one left off: on a boat, with our intrepid heroes under attack. Like this year’s Underworld: Awakening (a franchise helmed by another wife/husband actress/director combination), Alice wakes up from that attack in a mysterious medical facility. She is interrogated by Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), a friend turned brainwashed-foe, until the facility’s computer systems are compromised. This frees Alice, who is bound and determined to escape.

    The compound is, of course, impregnable. Buried in a polar ice cap and comprising several impossibly large reconstructions of major cities, this is the Umbrella Corporation’s home base, a place where clones are churned out and monsters run amok, all so the company can test how a given populace would react to an outbreak of its zombie plague. Why Umbrella deems the facility necessary after successfully launching humanity’s biological Armageddon is unknown, but the different settings (Tokyo, Times Square, Moscow, and “Suburbia”) offer Alice and those trapped in the facility with her a rich tableau of creatures to pump full of lead, from a fetishized Japanese zombie to giant, hangman-looking mutants wielding massive hammers to a humanoid of rippling musculature whose brain is unfortunately exposed. It also offers Alice a cute kid (Aryana Engineer) to protect, because it’s not enough that she escape Umbrella’s arctic hellpit on her own.

    Paul W.S. Anderson—the unchallenged master of video game adaptations—uses Resident Evil: Retribution as an excuse to gather the franchise’s most popular characters in the same building. There’s Ada Wong (Bingbing Li), a secret agent dressed for a better occasion than a zombie plague; Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), the former head of Umbrella and current smarmy leader of the human remnant; and the crack mercenary team of Leon Kennedy (Johann Urb), Barry Burton (Kevin Durand), and Luther West (Boris Kodjoe), who all function pretty much in the same way, but give fans of the video game different characters whose survival they can pull for or root against. The Umbrella Corporation’s taste for cloning provides for the return of Michelle Rodriguez in various forms—from anti-gun suburbanite to bad-ass, gun-toting company woman—joined from the first Resident Evil by the Red Queen, a computer program bent on snaring Alice in one of any number of elaborate death traps.

    It goes without saying that none of those death traps work, and that, while some characters die, none of them are particularly essential to the resolution of the series. Resident Evil has long been the action genre’s most needlessly complicated franchise, and that tradition continues here. Several characters change allegiance on a whim, and Anderson’s sequel-bating reveal at the end of the movie creates large gaps in logic that otherwise would have passed as setpieces. If the Red Queen is truly on the verge of eliminating the human race, as is her stated goal, why go to the trouble of endlessly cloning a wide-variety of them? If you have the last remaining human beings on Earth pinned to the White House lawn, why bother with the undersea arctic medical facility, its staff, or its prisoners at all?

    I admit, even those questions qualify as “over-thinking it” when it comes to a movie like Resident Evil: Retribution. Everybody who has stepped to the plate to review this film has pointed out that, five installments in, you either like or don’t like the series, and that everything else is either fan quibbling or noise. Fair point. Resident Evil: Retribution sets out to be a Resident Evil movie, and in that regard, it succeeds. The characters are paper-thin, the actors inhabiting them aren’t trying particularly hard, and the script they’re given isn’t good by any means, but if Resident Evil dealt in anything more challenging than archetypes, all that ambition would get in the way of Paul W.S. Anderson’s snazzy action sequences.

    Thinking about Resident Evil: Retribution and Underworld: Awakening again, that’s the main thing that distinguishes the two. For all their similarities (heroines in tight leather bondage gear, CGI monsters, impossible physics, convoluted backstories, expendable side characters), Anderson’s franchise has Len Wiseman’s beat out in sheer terms of clear, decipherable gunfights and martial arts expositions. The colors pop brighter, the bones crunch louder, and the heroine sasses her way through wave after wave of the undead, has no time to sulk or ponder the deeper significance of her existence as a superpowered killing machine. My only issue with Resident Evil: Retribution as a time-waster is that it’s the fifth of its kind. If you’ve seen Milla Jovovich kick one zombie in the head in slow-motion, you’ve seen her kick dozens of zombies in the head in slow-motion. And there’s a dozen more shambling down the hallway.

    Rating: Resident Evil: Retribution. Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. With Milla Jovovich (Alice), Michelle Rodriguez (Rain), Sienna Guillory (Jill Valentine), Aryana Engineer (Becky), and Bingbing Li (Ada Wong). Released September 14, 2012, by Screen Gems.

     

  • Movie Review: Underworld: Awakening (2012)

    Movie Review: Underworld: Awakening (2012)

    In all honesty, Underworld: Awakening is the first movie in the franchise I’ve seen that makes complete, perfect sense. Previous films in the Underworld series relied on an intricate, muddied backstory as a kind of smokescreen, lending significance to three rather insignificant movies where a woman in a leather catsuit blasted away at waves of CGI creatures who resemble the original Wolfman in name only. They were digestible enough, but boy did they have an unwarranted sense of self-importance, going on and on about vampire elders and ancient vamp/werewolf relations as if Kate Beckinsale needed an excuse for the outfit and the guns.

    The only past Underworld: Awakening is concerned with is the recent past, where Selene (Beckinsale) and her lover Michael (Scott Speedman, in previous films) attempt to escape underground in the aftermath of the human discovery of vampires and lycans, the human population having turned to mass genocide to rid themselves of both species. They’re both captured, but 12 years later Selene is released from her cryogenic freezing chamber, deep in the bowels of a medical research facility.

    In this brave new world, vampires and lycans have been driven deep underground, and, more importantly, Selene has a daughter, Eve (India Eisley), with whom she can telepathically communicate. As a vampire/lycan hybrid, Eve is of particular importance to the werewolves, who wish to use her genetic make-up to do some scientific hooey that’ll make their race unstoppable. The lab guys, led by Dr. Jacob Lane (Stephen Rea), also want Eve back, but if that’s due to her being “lab property” or because Lane has other, seedier plans is unknown. Pretty much, this sets up a bunch of shoot outs, chase scenes, and fight sequences where Selena and any number of allies take on the lycan horde and the occasional human interloper.

    That, in a nutshell, is Underworld: Awakening. Yes, there are subplots. The vampire underground is as snaky and worthy of mistrust as they were in previous installments, led by an elder vampire who holds Selene and her offspring in disregard. While this was the motivating factor behind other films in the franchise, here, one can’t help but sympathize with them. When the leader points out that most vampires fortunate enough to share a room with Selene end up dead, he is proven correct in short order, as the clan comes under attack from the lycan horde hunting her. Then there is the matter of the werewolf twice the size of any yet seen. The idea of lycan steroids is kind of interesting and barely touched upon, but in the end it plays out as you’d expect: The double werewolf gets the upper-hand for awhile, but he dies just like a normal one would. I presume the movie wants me to imagine a world where there are a ton of giant lycans running around, but the problem there isn’t the ridiculous conceit. Bigger might mean more dangerous, but considering that the wolves are all CGI, an army of giant werewolves standing shoulder to shoulder would probably make them look like normal werewolves.

    But complaining about the unnecessary in a movie like Underworld: Awakening is pretty pointless. We’re four movies in on this franchise, and it now appears to have found a comfort zone, like the Resident Evil series, where nothing really makes sense, but things keep happening if only because they must. Heck, the only real difference between the two franchises is a question of superpowers, and considering that Selene and the rest of the vampires in the Underworld quadrology don’t suck much blood and use guns to get their killing done, even that difference is negligible. Resident Evil holds an advantage over Underworld in that it doesn’t take itself too seriously, but Underworld has its backstory from which to rip new, blandly efficient vehicles from. It will always have vampires. It will always have werewolves. It, for better or worse, will always be safe.

    Unfortunately, “safe” in 2012 means “projected in 3D,” which means muted color schemes of gunmetal and cobalt in every conceivable location. There is little variance from one gunfight to the next and, apart from one or two cringeworthy bits during the fighting, nothing really exciting happens. There’s a pile of dead bodies in this film that reaches to the vanishing point, but they’re all nameless, faceless, without impact, either carrying guns or brandishing claws. This, certainly, is to be expected from most brainless entertainments, but Underworld has long pretended to be something more than that. And yet, beneath the skintight catsuits and the endless gunplay, Underworld: Awakening is heartless, antiseptic. I can’t say I’m surprised by my lack of interest in Selene’s ongoing plight, given all that. One doesn’t stay 15 forever. Eventually, women become real.

    Rating:

    Underworld: Awakening. Directed by Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein. With Kate Beckinsale (Selene), Stephen Rea (Dr. Jacob Lane), Michael Early (Det. Sebastian), Theo James (David), and India Eisley (Eve). Released January 20, 2012, by Screen Gems.