The people calling this a final bow on this series of films are morons. It’s a movie that retcons almost every major thing that happens in the prior films, and does everything it does worse than them. The last movie ends promising a final showdown at the White House, with Alice having regained her T-virus telekinesis powers or whatever, and this movie just skips over all that, tells us the injection of T-virus was fake, and does its own stupid thing.

It’s so tonally and aesthetically inconsistent with the previous film! The last film had Jill Valentine in this ridiculous purple leather catsuit, and this one is just drab, brown, and dirty full nearly its full runtime. The action is total shit, with all footage of any fight scene apparently put in a blender with a required one cut every half second so you can’t tell what’s going on. I assume this is to cover for a complete lack of choreo and fight skill. The bring back the Hive, and I guess it’s meant to be a full circle moment, but it doesn’t land and feels more pathetic than nostalgic.

I’ll admit that I’m judging this movie on the basis of its place in the awkward, lurching franchise, but you had best not call yourself “the final chapter” if this is what you’re bringing to the table. I think it’s the egregious, purposeless retcons that get to me. I saw the previous films, and you’re going to punish that by telling me that no, the things that I saw didn’t actually happen? What even was the point of any of it?

This movie is incoherent. It’s leaning on its own imagery far too hard for such a milquetoast series of action films. It includes far too many characters from the games, then gives them absolutely nothing to do. There are artificial realities in giant domes, like in Truman Show, containing clones of the characters playing out scenarios that don’t have much rhyme or reason. There’s a small child we’re meant to care about, I guess, and this series does have something about ~6-year-old girls, I guess, since that’s also one of the major antagonists in computer form. I’m a fan of clones in media, as they give a way to show the paths not taken, or a lens to examine a character’s relationship with themselves, but they’re grossly underutilized here.

But it does occasionally have some interesting imagery, and the action is better than it was in previous films, with less nauseating jump cuts, but all sense of storytelling has been thrown out the window, and more than half the spectacle doesn’t land.

I did appreciate having Michelle Rodriguez back though, as little narrative sense or storytelling importance as it had.

God this movie is weird. It takes place six entire years after the zombie apocalypse, but everyone treats it like it’s been a handful of months, and the buildings are all still burning. The timeline makes no sense whatsoever, and if they were getting loose with it, I might understand that, but they explicitly say that it’s 18 months after the previous film.

The movie opens with Mila Jovovich clones in leathers fighting against facist-coded Umbrella goons, then we hard pivot into some boring post-apocalypse stuff that feels like it’s pulling from other movies that have done it much, much better (particularly Romero). Then the final fifteen minutes return to ever-more-ridiculous action scenes in a sterile white room with bad CGI and action scenes that were ten times more over the top.

It’s a bad movie, but it leans into it, which helps mitigate some of the badness. Except that there are also moments when it’s just regular bad, like when Mila Jovovich is vlogging, or when it’s poorly aping Dawn of the Dead, or leaning on being a franchise that I don’t care too much about.

Sheesh, and I thought the movie before this was bad. The writing is terrible, and there are two plots that don’t really intersect with each other all that well. It’s also totally divorced from any context that anyone would care about, post-apocalyptic in a way that it utterly refuses to sell, and they do nothing good or interesting with the one place they actually go to, Vegas. Years later, Zack Snyder would make a Las Vegas zombie movie, and he at least understood that I want to see zombified showgirls and Elvis impersonators.

For some inexplicable reason there’s a vaguely emo teenager wearing heavy eyeliner and striped socks, and every time she was on screen it cracked me up, because it’s been five years or something since the zombies took over, and it just makes no fucking sense whatsoever. The whole convoy thing was a complete waste of time, which is very bad, because it made up the majority of the runtime.

And what time wasn’t spent on the convoy was spent rehashing some of the first movie. I can’t tell if this was an attempt to recapture some of the magic of the first movie, or some very premature nostalgia given that movie was only five years ago, but it comes off desperate, even if it was more interesting than the other things they had going on.

A much worse sequel in pretty much every way, with very little of what made the first film work (to the extent it did). The woman they got to play Jill Valentine was awful, the comic relief was terrible, and the direction got noticeably worse, either phoned in or constrained by budget. Every fight scene sucks because it’s a collection of essentially unrelated flash cuts, no hit sold, no contact visceral.

The story here is nonsense and asks me to care about Matt, one of the weaker characters from the first movie. The one saving grace was Mila Jovovich running down the side of a building, and they flubbed the end of that stunt with more stale, nonsense action.

I was surprised by how well this movie aged, with the exception of the zombie dogs, which always looked a little silly. It’s got some strong late 90s early aughts energy to it, and it’s not exactly high art, but there are moments of clever, interesting things. Who doesn’t love that scene where the lasers cut up all those people? Or the cheesy lines? There’s a part early on where Milla Jovovich wakes up with amnesia, finds a piece of paper with some writing on it, and writes the same thing to check whether or not it’s her handwriting. That’s not a level of cleverness that the rest of the movie really delivers on, but it is clever.

And yeah, some of the acting is rough, even for what it is, and the plot is maybe a little bit nonsense at times, but it has a real charm to it even a quarter of a century later.

This movie was released in March of 2002, so is not a proper post-9/11 movie. It originally had a subtitle of “Ground Zero”, which was removed when that got a different connotation, but other than that, it’s hard to see any particular impact on the film, or a way in which the film reflects pre-9/11 sensibilities. I did wonder what wars Umbrella Corporation was developing this virus for though, and they kept saying that “people would pay handsomely for it”, but this makes me raise an eyebrow, because … who? Which people? At this particular point in history, who would Umbrella have been developing this weapon for? It feels like a Cold War anachronism, which I guess is better than gesturing at Umbrella developing weapons for terrorists.

It’s channeling Tarantino, and aside from the CGI pig, I thought it did as well as it reasonably could. It’s stacked with effects and fight scenes, doesn’t take itself seriously, and you get to see someone cut their way through a building full of people. What more could you want?

Well, to answer my own question, the concept of “each floor devoted to another vice” felt largely unexplored, a promise that wasn’t really paid off. And as with other “violence against these rich assholes” movies, the inclusion of the help as collaborators does blur the message a little bit. The primary antagonist of this movie is not a rich person, but rather, someone in the working class. But it’s not a movie that’s really meant to survive contact with an examination of what it’s saying, it’s a movie where humans are pressurized sacks of blood.

The movie is mostly a failure, but not entirely without its charms. I think it wants to be too many things, both sentimental and gritty, which pulls it in different directions that it fails to synthesize. Peirce Brosnan is doing a terrible accent throughout, which doesn’t help matters. The writing occasionally works, and other times is shaky as hell.

Mostly I wish they would stop making movies about “aging badasses”, but I guess I understand the impetus for why Hollywood keeps doing this. What else are you going to do with a bunch of aging stars like Brosnan?