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Resident Evil Retribution (2012).
I was around a pals house and he was playing Resident Evil 6 and asked me if I had seen the latest film.
Not so much a guilty pleasure as an exercise in rubbernecking I had seen all the others up to that point with the same pal so I braced myself for more of the same.
The premise was more interesting this time with an underground maze of simulated environments (the test ground for the various BOWs Umbrella used to sell before the world went splerrrp!).
It's a bit like The Crystal Maze with zombies.
Milla Jovovich is getting on a bit so almost all the action is in the slow motion video collage style so successfully lambasted by RLM.
Alice wakes up again (she always does so nothing new there) imprisoned in the said facility wearing a dishcloth mysteriously attached to her rude bits.
Her arch enemy Wesker sends game favorite Ada Wong to rescue her and she travels through the zones collecting enough crystals to attempt to win a mountaineering weekend in the Cairngorms...sorry.
The film riffs Aliens shamelessly and dares to shoehorn a terrible depiction of Leon Kennedy and an even worse depiction Barry Burton.
This reveals everything that is wrong with this increasingly cheap looking film series.
It's basically a filmed unconvincing video game cosplay party helmed by a precocious girl child.
The way children play is replicated in the scripting of these films.
Right I will go over here and hide behind this wall and the baddy will walk over here, and you, you and you will pop out and distract him and I will save you all.
When the last shot of the film is in the trailers it's time to give up.
**********SPOILERS*****************************************
If the underground bunker was perfectly balanced and could churn out humans over and over why destroy it and escape to a surface world overrun by virus monsters?
Wouldn't it have made better sense to purge the red queen from the base and use it as a 'rebel base' and repopulate the planet with the offspring of the clones?
Why does my brain even make room for such ideas?
It was one case where the obvious twist ending would have been more cool.
If Alice had always been in the bunker and that the events of the previous films had all been a simulation it would have provided a much cleaner slate to set up a sequel than the mess this film ends with.
*******************End of spoilers*****************************
This series needs a send off and a reboot as a series of genuinely scary adaptations of the games (which these films have never resembled).
Alice needs to grow up.
Balls nowhere to be seen.