The Resident Evil movie franchise has always been far from good except, arguably, with the second movie which showed some weird marks of quality in a couple of areas. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, the apparent endpoint in the fifteen-year-old movie series, is just as laughable in terms of its narrative, script and acting. It seems as if Paul Anderson and main star Milla Jovovich care even less here than they did all the way back in 2002.
The film takes place after the ending of 2012’s Resident Evil: Retribution which left Alice, Leon, Wesker and company to fight a massive horde of T-Virus-infected zombies and monsters. The Final Chapter decides to skip all of that entirely and tell us that all of our “favourite” characters–bar Wesker and, of course, Alice–died off-screen during the battle we never saw.
During the first fifteen minutes after the series’ staple narrated opening, still featuring the now iconic “My name is Alice” line and a heavily-edited action sequence with a T-Virus infected giant bat from the ending of the previous film, Alice meets the Red Queen from the original film who tells her that Umbrella has hidden an airborne antivirus inside the place where this entire franchise started, The Hive.
Fans of the movie series may find one aspect of this new installment infuriating. The Red Queen and the reason why the T-Virus was created–main plot points of the original two movies–have been changed in order to pull off a “clever” plot twist in The Final Chapter’s third act. Without spoiling the new installment, the Red Queen, who was originally created in the image of Angela Ashford after her father created the T-Virus to help her walk, has been entirely rewritten, leaving the second movie with nothing important.
The adjustment of important plot points from previous entries in the series isn’t the only writing problem that The Final Chapter suffers from. With originally a decent time limit of 48 hours to save the entire world from utter annihilation, Alice completely screws this by getting knocked out and captured twice in succession. She then proceeds to battle Umbrella forces for a few hours before proceeding to do the important task she was originally tasked with.
The saving grace of the Resident Evil movies has always been its teeth-to-the-wall action scenes and this is no different. All of Milla Jovovich’s stunts–whether done by her or her stunt double before her awful accident during filming–are all gracefully executed. However, Resident Evil’s once-hilarious fight scenes are marred by an overactive editor who can’t seem to take his fingers off the snip tool. Action sequences will cut from shot-to-shot multiple times in a second until the fight scene ends. For an entire feature-length film, this led to headaches for the group I was with.
Resident Evil’s inherent cheesiness still shines through. While laughing at a movie instead of with it shouldn’t be a good thing, it still makes the movie more enjoyable than it has any right to be. Plot details involving the clones introduced in Resident Evil: Extinction lead to the plot being even more convoluted than it used to be, but it also leads to some of the most hilarious moments that have ever occurred in the Resident Evil franchise. These instances include, but are not limited to, hilarious reactions to dismemberment, awful “badass” lines that bring on the chuckles, and weirdly-placed shots of villains peacefully sipping whiskey in a montage.
Summary
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is a laughably terrible film with awful, headache-inducing editing, acting and reworking of an entire plot. If you’re a fan of the previous movies, you’ll probably have a good time, but for the rest you should skip this movie at all costs. Now let me go take my Excedrin.
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.