After what may have felt like forever to some, the Resident Evil movies have finally come to an end. Even if it is one of the most critically-panned movie franchises before Michael Bay’s Transformers tested audiences’ collective patience, the Resident Evil series lasted longer than it should have.
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is the sixth movie based loosely on the Resident Evil video game series. Nearly a decade after she first awakened, Alice (Milla Jovovich) journeys back to Raccoon City to put an end to the nefarious Umbrella Corporation. With the fate of humanity resting on her shoulders, Alice must find a way to kill the T-Virus once and for all and learn the truths behind the world’s end.
The Resident Evil movies have earned a legacy of becoming a convenient set of blueprints on how not to make a movie. Despite ending a mess of a series, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter surprisingly exceeded a few expectations – but when it concludes a franchise whose average score on RottenTomatoes is 28.33%, that isn’t saying much.
Too Lazy to Die
Even with poor reception from both critics and enraged fans of the games, the Resident Evil movies are bound to make a strong profit. If the least amount of effort guarantees the biggest imaginable profit, why bother exerting even an iota of effort in the first place?
The Final Chapter perfectly embodies this laziness by feeling like a movie made in 2002 even if it was released in 2017. From obnoxious jump scares telegraphed by ear-piercing musical cues, to atrocious lighting meant to obscure the cheap special effects, to epileptic action scenes shot in shaky-cam style that was most probably put together by an editor whose veins are filled with lethal amounts of energy drinks, The Final Chapter is a product of a bygone era that was just farted into existence. Rather than being a decent film adaptation of a popular game, the movie doubles as a loud assault on the senses and an uninspired collection of every imaginable predictable post-apocalypse story trope out there.
Even if somebody tried, it’s impossible to get invested in the movie because The Final Chapter glosses over anything that resembles a coherent story. Instead, it gets bored of character development and quickly jumps to the next big seizure-inducing action set-piece. Thankfully, I saw this movie in a digital 2D presentation, making it more tolerable than anticipated.
May God help whoever had to watch the cinematic equivalent of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) in 3D.
Confusing Undead Problems
The biggest problem with The Final Chapter is not the incomprehensible editing style, but its failure as a sequel and a finale. Though it’s possible to watch this film on its own, it bears the burden of being a story’s conclusive, sixth chapter. Newcomers will find the movie forgettable, but veterans of the series will find themselves infuriated by the lack of continuity. Even worse, Alice’s action-packed farewell punishes anyone who endured the series by rewriting and contradicting its lore and mythos on the fly.
Anyone who cares about continuity is bound to see a rise in their blood pressure when trying to outline whatever the hell is happening in Resident Evil while acknowledging the twists revealed in the last movie. While some of the revelations of Alice’s and Umbrella’s motivations are actually interesting, they only do more harm to the series’ already shaky continuity than good.
Cases in point: Umbrella’s new motivations contradict the first Resident Evil and the bioweapons arms race implied in Resident Evil: Afterlife, the new origins of the T-Virus contradict what was established in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the world is about to end (again) even after it should have died after Resident Evil: Extinction, and Albert Wesker’s (Shawn Roberts) authority is ignored even if he was the super-powered leader of humanity’s last survivors at the end of Resident Evil: Retribution. The only consistent things in The Final Chapter are Alice’s status as a super-powered goddess of zombie slaughter, and the series’ addiction to clones and laser beam rooms.
The fact that I remembered these details shows that I paid more attention to the story than director Paul W.S. Anderson did. Given that he made an entire movie franchise for his wife, I was expecting more from him.
Wrath of The B-Movie Virus
But despite all of my pessimistic nitpicking, The Final Chapter is still one of the more competent movies in the whole Resident Evil movie franchise.
The action is hard to follow, but there’s a commendable attempt to showcase visceral fight scenes instead of slow-motion sequences meant to show off Milla Jovovich’s legs. The adherence to cheap scares is tiresome, but The Final Chapter is one of the few Resident Evil movies that actually tried to follow its source material’s horror-inspired roots. The plot is inconsistent with the previous movies, but The Final Chapter wraps things up and finally opens the door for the eventual Resident Evil movie reboot.
Without a doubt, The Final Chapter is a trashy movie that will offend Resident Evil purists and anyone who has high cinematic expectations. But what sets it apart from truly horrible movies is that The Final Chapter knows what it is. This movie acknowledges that it won’t win any awards, so it just focuses on keeping viewers entertained without any pretenses of depth or social relevance.
The sixth Resident Evil movie is never boring and it can be entertaining for those who know how to turn one highbrow critic’s trash into another’s guilty pleasure. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter will not be remembered fondly by most viewers, but it will be regarded as a modern day B-Movie meant for a niche audience – a weird crowd yours truly proudly identifies with.
That, and The Final Chapter features a Bible-thumping, knife-wielding and Kung Fu-expert Ser Jorah Mormont (Iian Glen) as its main villain. Unless you can name another movie with that kind of antagonist, don’t be so quick to dismiss The Final Chapter.
