Movie Review: Resident Evil the final chapter

Yesterday I went to the cinema with some of my closest friends to watch the final movie in Paul W.S Anderson’s Resident evil franchise.

My expectations before I went in to the movie theater were not high as all the previous movies before are only enjoyable at best of times.They have always been a “no brainer action” with decent special effects and acting from the cast and I’m thinking that is what Paul W.S Anderson wants with this franchise.

The movie starts as the others, at first glimpse a calm atmosphere with the usual wake up by Alice as she tries to figure out where she is… you know the usual introduction to the previous movies. Then the jumpscares galore happen and I tell you it is A LOT of cheap jumpscares in this movie. They try to build up tension but almost everytime the scares are very obvious and just out of place in many parts of the film. It kind of feels that the director just wants to force himself to just shove through jumpscares down our throats in these movies, during the entire franchise. I’m not joking when the first 30 min of the movie has 15-20 jumpscares in them…*sigh.

My biggest issue with this movie, and also the previous ones to a large extent, the camera and “cutting and paste” parts of the action scenes. OMG they are insufferable. The camera just shakes á la The Bourne Supremacy and it also cuts like twenty times during some of the action scenes which last for like three minutes, I’m not even kidding. My brain is just trying to wrap up what is happening on the screen and who is hitting whom or which person died or who killed whom. It’s just a complete mess and it kind of feels like they just want to save money on the action parts to diminish the special effects costs and the time saving of the fighting coordination costs, or something, I actually have no idea.

Now let’s just give a quick cast performance reflection. Milla Jovovich does as she always does a good performance as the heroine Alice during this entire franchise and this movie is no different. She does her job good to play the badass zombie killer but her character Alice is such a dull and kind of boring one when we look at the character in depth. Alice is almost everytime suffering from amnesia of some sort during the entire series which is kind of a shame really as I like Milla as an actress and I feel that she would deserve more character development for her character Alice during these six films.

The best performance of this film was Milla and the director Paul’s daughter Ever Anderson who plays the Red Queen in this film. She does a very good and solid performance as the supercomputer where the “machine like” attributes are displayed in a very solid way. She gives a good explanation to us as an audience and to the character Alice as well during the runtime. This is impressive due to the young age of Ever. So if she keeps this up she will have a bright future in the movie industry.

The other supporting characters and the villains do a passable job but nothing more than that. I do not feel a connection to neither one of the survivors nor do I care when some of them die. The feeling of a presence of a good antagonist in this movie is just a bit disappointing as well. Both Dr.Isaacs (Iain Glen) and Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts) are only stealing eachothers thunder and it would have been good if one of those characters just wasn’t in the movie at all (preferable keeping Wesker as he was the main antagonist in the previous two films).

So to finally summarize this film with a grade out of ten I will give Resident Evil: The final chapter

4,5 / 10