Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2017)

IMDB rating 7.2/10  

Story line

Picking up immediately after the events in Resident Evil: Retribution, Alice (Milla Jovovich) is the only survivor of what was meant to be humanity's final stand against the undead. Now, she must return to where the nightmare began - The Hive in Raccoon City, where the Umbrella Corporation is gathering its forces for a final strike against the only remaining survivors of the apocalypse.

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

Writer: Paul W.S. Anderson

Stars: Ruby Rose, Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter

R | 1h 46min | Action, Horror, Sci-Fi

 IMDB link H ere

Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆

  Milla Jovovich needs to escape this undead franchise  

Everyone would understand if Milla Jovovich had simply had enough of the Resident Evil series, “Sometimes I feel this has been my whole life. Running. Killing,” moans her character, Alice, in the sixth and latest one.

If she’s reassured by its subtitle, The Final Chapter, she may want to investigate Friday the 13th, Part IV: The Final Chapter (1984), which was followed immediately by Part V: A New Beginning (1985) and about six further sequels.

Jovovich’s husband Paul WS Anderson, who has directed all but two of them, doesn’t need long to apprise us of the goings on so far

Anderson borrows so many bits and pieces from James Cameron’s Aliens you sometimes wonder if he’s seen a single other film. Ah – Terminator 2. Wait, there’s some Mad Max: Fury Road thrown in, for good measure. These are prime sources for a post-apocalyptic chase movie that winds up in a facility called the Hive, but Anderson’s magpie plundering is haphazard to the point of lunacy.

It’s also deafening. Every single thing that happens is cranked up to ludicrous, eardrum-shattering levels. A dot matrix printer gets set off in the dark, and it sounds like the planet is ripping in half. Hush and patience are simply not in Anderson’s vocabulary. He bombards you as if terrified of encroaching tedium, and the set pieces trip each other up in their sheer haste.

Casting has often been one of his stronger suits. The underrated Fraser James, whose electric, gravelly voice is easily the best thing on the soundtrack, puts up a good fight in support – more so than Shawn Roberts, as the kind of gym-bunny rent-a-villain who wears sunglasses indoors and says nothing that isn’t sarcastic.

Jovovich, a theoretically interesting star given robotic tasks throughout, plays disabled, too, as an earlier incarnation of Alice (hello, Alien: Resurrection) wheeled on in old lady make-up. Her faint resemblance to Theresa May is doubtless unintentional but nonetheless comical. Talks with Merkel? A New Beginning? What is it this time? Someone needs to get her out of this.

Read Full review at Telegraph

Movie Rating ★☆☆☆☆

 This movie can turn you into a zombie

Around 4,000 people are all that remains of the non-infected world when Alice takes off this time to save it in Resident Evil. Well, you can’t accuse the filmmakers of not being ambitious enough. It’s taken them six films born of a video game, 14-plus years, and $1 billion in profits to bring the world to this. With many, many zombies still to be killed.

However, it’s doubtful how many of the film series’ persistent fans will continue to believe that. There is little in The Final Chapter in terms of characters bar Alice, there is little in terms of novelty particularly in the zombies, there is little in terms of a story as Alice battles Umbrella one zombie at a time, there is little in terms of ideas as old sequences are resurrected, and there is little in terms of a conversation when not more than two sentences are strung other.

Jovovich remains fighting fit, though (including hanging from vehicles, heights, and upside down) and as she drives off into the sunset saying “my work is not done”, it’s obvious none of the above matters. ‘The Final Chapter’, you bet, is far from the last one. Just an alternative fact.

Read Full Review atThe Indian Express

  
The Final Chapter' Is A Disappointing Series Finale  

I don’t know if this is truly the last installment of the 15-year old Resident Evil franchise. After all, Friday the 13th, Saw and Shrek all had “the final chapter” episodes that turned out (or will soon turn out) to not be the last chapter. This sixth Resident Evil doesn’t have the “every step has led to this moment” finality until close to the end, but it ends well and offers a note of completion should the book indeed remain closed.

Longtime fans will get their money’s worth regarding finality, and the series certainly ends with more honor than the Saw franchise.  Alas a stand-alone movie, it stumbles more than it stands.

First, the film picks up three weeks after the events of Resident Evil: Retribution, which means that promised “Alice and friends versus all the zombies in Washington DC” melee occurs entirely off-screen with little discussion beyond “It went badly, and only Alice remains.” That is a bit of a letdown right there, and it may well be a point of consternation for fans.

While the last two Paul W.S. Anderson-directed installments were almost hypnotically surreal and freaky weird, this one returns to the somewhat grounded nature of the first three films, specifically the first two sequels. The bad news is that, for reasons I can only speculate upon, the action is chopped to bits this time around. Gone are the long, fluid, 3D-friendly action beats in favor of the all-too-common hyperactive editing style popularized by those trying to emulate Paul Greengrass’s Bourne sequels.

While the editing obscures many of the action beats, what we do get is impressively staged and choreographed. Milla Jovovich again makes a dynamic action hero, and there are any number of showy one-on-one smack downs amid the carnage and chaos, including a first-act climax atop at least one speeding automobile.

Aside from the action, Anderson’s screenplay runs in place for much of its first hour, only really coming to life in the final few reels as the would-be final conflict comes about and we start getting tasty exposition nuggets. Before that point, especially after the big first-act action sequence, the film is frankly a little dull.

It’s more like a conventional 80’s slasher with somewhat muted carnage along with one or two gore highlight moments.

But things do pick up towards the end as the film does its best to work as a definitive conclusion not just to itself but the entire six-part series. The climactic reveals and showdowns work as intended and the film unquestionably ends well. That may be damning with faint praise, but again I imagine those checking this will already be committed to seeing it through to the end.

This is cinematographer Glen MacPherson’s fifth film for the director, and he again creates a gorgeous image, with a palette that feels just a touch oversaturated and washed-out but never lacking in crisp, grim details. The film may be cheaper than the last two, but every penny is on the screen. For those who just want to see Alice kick zombie ass in a post-apocalyptic landscape one last time, this will fit the bill.

It’s not one of the better installments, and it isn’t a good movie on its own terms, I remain impressed by the series as a whole. No, I don’t necessarily love any of the six entries, but even the first film was an obvious example of a video game franchise that didn’t depend on its fan base to break out. It was a female-led action sci-fi horror franchise way before it was cool, and it was a big-budget zombie adventure before even the likes of 28 Days Later. Resident Evil succeeded by offering something different in the marketplace and then continued to thrive as an honest-to-goodness B-movie and female-centric franchise as tentpole fever slowly took over the industry.

Read full review at Forbes

Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆

More dull and deafening antics

3

The violence keeps coming in this movie, but, if there’s one thing more devastatingly brutal than the law of the jungle, it’s the law of diminishing returns. The sixth film in the Resident Evil franchise might pick up some farewell-tour custom by calling itself The Final Chapter, but the ending naturally leaves things open for a seventh. Just as Kate Beckinsale climbed back into the skintight leathers for another Underworld outing, so Milla Jovovich is back in residence for yet another high-impact action thriller set in a gruesome zombified world, with Iain Glen reprising his turn as the creepy megalomaniac scientist. There’s a great deal of yucky horror-violence testing the limit of that 15 certificate. It often features Jovovich on a motorbike roaring sexily, endlessly, across a post-apocalyptic landscape where petrol supplies apparently aren’t a problem. As ever, this Resident Evil is about cloning and corporate duplicity and people getting savagely beaten, and it mashes up Night of the Living Dead and Mad Max. Jovovich and Glen do their best with what they’re given, and the digital rendering of that wrecked vista of Washington DC is impressive, but in dramatic terms it’s as perfunctorily presented as everything else. Another deafening, boring episode.

Read Full review at The Guardian

  
Milla Jovovich returns as the ass-kicking Alice in this supposed last installment of the long-running, video game-inspired franchise.

Marking the announced end of the video game-inspired sci-fi/horror film franchise that has produced six films in 15 years (it’s amazing how time flies when you’re bored out of your mind), Resident Evil: The Final Chapter delivers fans more of the same. Again starring the formidable Milla Jovovich as Alice, the ass-kicking heroine desperately attempting to save society from being decimated by an evil corporation, this installment provides a fitting finale for the series, inasmuch as it’s as mediocre as all the ones preceding it.

As with the recent edition of the similar Underworld franchise, the film begins with a recap of what’s gone on before, which seems less designed for newcomers than viewers who’ve actually seen the previous entries but can’t remember a thing about them.

Jovovich, who doesn’t seem to have aged a bit since the series began, anchors the proceedings with her intense charisma and fierce athleticism. Alice remains an unstoppable physical force, capable of quickly dispatching a half-dozen armed bad guys even while hanging upside down, and Jovovich makes it all seem entirely credible. The action is practically nonstop from beginning to end, but is never remotely exciting due to the Cuisinart-style editing that reduces it all to an incomprehensible, messy blur. But the relentless mayhem at least has the benefit of providing mercifully little opportunity for the actors to deliver ham-fisted dialogue on the order of, “What are we going to do?” “We’re going to kill every last one of them.”

Fans will appreciate the appearance of such semi-regulars as Ali Larter as the scrappy Claire and Shawn Roberts as the villainous Albert Wesker. But such newcomers to the series as Ruby Rose (Orange Is the New Black) and Japanese actress/model Rola are barely given enough screen time to make an impression.

The climactic sequence admittedly delivers a few surprises — hint, hint: Clones are involved — that at least attempt to provide a smidgen of coherence to the absurdly convoluted storyline. And while Alice informs us via voiceover narration that “This is the end of my story,” the door is left wide open for, God help us, future installments.

Read Full Review at Hollywood Reporter