Here it is. After weeks and weeks of dreading it, speculating on just how much it could suck, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter has released on January 27, 2017. How bad is it?

Surprisingly enough, it’s not…hatefully bad. As in, I wouldn’t go out of my way to burn every copy of it like I would have liked to do with some other movies out there. In fact, I think this would have made a good video game.

…wait.

Despite being the most financially successful video game movie franchises out there, the Resident Evil film series had chugged out five movies so far, each dropping lower and lower in critic and audience enjoyment. By now, almost no one seems to really care for these films anymore than the most foolishly dedicated of the fans. How can I tell? When I watched this movie, it was on opening night.

There were a grand total of six people in the theater.

Caustic comments aside, the movie’s out now, and it has…rather good results. Compared to the other installments, that is. Which meant a score well under a 50% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Still, I do have to agree that his movie fully deserves that 40%. It’s definitely the best out of all the Resident Evil movies. That wasn’t a compliment, by the way. Before I went to the movie, I posted this on an online chat. To quote myself;

I can’t believe how right I was.

The premise is this; Alice, the series’ titular heroine played by Mila Jovovich, is among humanity’s last survivors. The Umbrella corporation has gathered up the hordes of undead and is planning one last strike against all the remaining humans, wiping out our species. Aided by Umbrella’s A.I. Red Queen, Alice much travel back to Raccoon city to find a way of stopping Umbrella and ending the apocalypse once and for all.

Out of all the Resident Evil movies, other than the first one, this is the most video-game like one so far. As in, there’s a constant parade of action with barely any plot whatsoever. The premise above is literally the plot of the entire movie, with only a few dull twists thrown here and there. But that also means that the story is quite simple and easy to digest. From the start, Alice is given a main objective; stop Umbrella. The way the story progresses is also like a video game. Alice gets a new mission. Umbrella sends an obstacle to stop her. She beats through and completes her mission, and is given a new one. Lather, rinse, repeat a few times, and you get this movie. To its credit, while agonizingly formulaic, it is quite kinetic, with one obstacle swiftly following another for the survivors to overcome.

Too kinetic. Director Paul W.S. Anderson obviously realized that it would be best to cut out as much unnecessary plot points or drama from the film, and he keeps it rushing along at a furious pace; so much that the movie begins to trip over itself. The pacing of this movie is a runaway train, never giving you a second’s rest, not even a chance to try and immerse yourself into the atmosphere. While it might work for some action flicks like The Bourne Ultimatum, this is definitely not the case.

The movie is just action sequence after action sequence, with literally nothing in terms of story or character. Things just happen; there’s just the minimal amount of reason for it to happen, and then it is thrown at you onscreen. While it doesn’t have anything unnecessary in it, it also doesn’t have anything necessary either. The plot is wildly inconsistent from the previous installments. Characters like Jill Valentine or Chris Redfield outright disappear after the previous movies, and the backstory behind a certain character integral to the plot is also completely overridden. Albert Wesker comes out like he’s going to be the central villain of the story, but doesn’t even get a proper fight scene; not onscreen anyways. It’s as if the writers just ignored the other Resident Evil movies outright just to have a coherent final chapter.

It’s not even a coherent one either. It’s definitely not incoherent, but that’s because there’s no story to be incoherent in the first place. Say what you will about other mindless action flicks like the Transformers movies, but at least they had some semblance to a plot and consistent characters. This movie has barely any of that. Many side characters are introduced, but they are as quickly forgotten as I did, and they do nothing notable to distinguish themselves; again, because of the rapid-fire pacing of this film. The movie tries to create some drama between them, but there’s so little of it that I couldn’t care less. The villains don’t fare much better, as they just do what all cliched villains do in movies; stand or sit around wearing suits/coats talking about their diabolical plans for the world.

Alice get the most “development” as the titular heroine, but even that is stretching it. Mila Jovovich, for the most part, is doing her usual schtick, running around and shooting up hordes of zombies, and occasionally scissor kicking Umbrella soldiers. The movie attempts to expand upon her backstory, but not only does this feel tacked on and inconsistent, but it’s also rushed too much for us to even try and relate to her. If the movie expanded its runtime a bit more and gave us a few moments to take a breath between all the video game levels and boss fights, maybe we could have seen actual insight into how the last survivors of humanity are feeling. And even that fact, that humanity is nearly dead, doesn’t really come to you when the story is focused solely in a single city and its underground facility. It’s as if they carved all the fat off the meat – along with the meat.

And what’s left isn’t good meat either. Even if the movie had had more time to devote to the “story,” it would still have been a to-the-book B-grade zombie flick, hitting every single cliched plot point as it goes along. You can practically see every twist and turn coming, even when the movie tries to be a bit more clever later on with the story. I could tell where a zombie was going to pop out, who was going to die, what the bad guys were going to say, all of it. A bunch of undistinguishable human characters along with Alice? No doubt they’re going to get picked off one by one in what I guess are supposed to be emotional moments; but as the movie never even gave us time to know them, and their characterization was hackneyed to begin with, I couldn’t even tell who exactly had died until the next group shot.

But it’s fine. All that’s still fine. I went into the theater fully expecting all that. I knew that I couldn’t see proper plot or characters from these movies anymore. So all the film had to do was give me some exciting action scenes for my eyes to feast on. Couldn’t have been hard, right?

Oh, how wrong I was.

Why, oh why was this in 3D? The Resident Evil movies had never had good CG to begin with, so what was the point in making the film 3D, so that the already bad effects are even more grossly augmented? They were an eyesore, especially when it tried to go for those landscape shots. That was a waste of budget. Also, the camera. Good lord, you have not seen shaky cam until you have seen this movie. During the various fights scenes in this movie, I could count at least an average of three to four cuts per second. Waving the camera incoherently fools no one, so why is director Anderson still going on with that? That, combined with the notorious 3D effects, had me walking out of the theater thouroughly nauseated. What little of it I could sit through was weighed down by issues with the lighting; this movie does not believe in colors other than faded gray, brown, or black, and that combined with the poor lighting in many of the action scenes, make the already indecipherable action scenes even worse.

And yet, I can’t say they are unsalvageable. There were some scenes that I did enjoy watching, such as the survivors holding fort against an army of zombies, or a race with a tank and the undead on a highway. Those had some tension in them so that, despite me hardly caring about the characters, I could still nod in approval to.

The ending left me with rather mixed feelings. On one hand, I feel like that was the only time when the story really worked, and when Alice felt like an actual human for once in the last six movies. However, they pull it off with the biggest deus ex machina that they could have come up with, and a completely predictable one as well. I won’t spoil anymore, but the ones out there who actually went to watch this on opening night (which I know there are precious few) will know what I’m talking about. Some characters just don’t die, do they?

If I hadn’t made it clear by now, being the best out of all the movies in this franchise doesn’t excuse it from being a terrible movie. It does have less pedestrian drama than the previous installments, and the one I feel can be the most “fun” to watch (if you can hold back the nausea). But that’s it. There’s nothing else in this movie that impressed me; it didn’t have time to impress me when it seems that Anderson was anxious to cut to the chase as quickly as possible. And even when it does barrel into the climax, the cliched and clunky narrative ruin what actually could have been a proper ending to this train wreck of a series. It may serve as a mild dinner to the eyes (with possibility of indigestion later), but it leaves the cranium as dry as the countless husks of Raccoon City.

Final Verdict: 1/5

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter offers barebones, chaotic but admittedly fun action pieces – and literally nothing else.