photo courtesy of Georges Biard, Wikipedia
The latest – and last – installment in the “Resident Evil” movie franchise, “Resident Evil: The Final Chapter,” is a fun action movie that never lets up its fast pace. The story follows the last efforts of Alice (Milla Jovovich), a super strong and amazing fighter. Audiences will see her fight monsters, clones, people with cybernetic enhancements and the undead in her quest to get the antidote to the T-virus that will kill the countless zombies infected with it.
The antidote is in Raccoon City, the iconic urban wasteland home to The Hive, which is an underground laboratory owned by the infamous Umbrella Corporation. Throughout her adventures in the city she meets and loses some friends as she goes through crazy adventures in an attempt to save them. Over the course of the film’s runtime, she slaughters thousands of zombies in the most thrilling ways one can possibly think of.
However, despite the cool zombies and visually stunning kills that appear onscreen, it can’t outrun two major flaws. The first flaw regards the movie’s protagonist, Alice. She's too good at her job.. No matter what the scenario is – whether it be hanging upside down without a weapon while surrounded by troops, driving away from a truck shooting at her for a full minute (and not getting hit once, in spite of the truck’s targeting system) or being chained up and thrown out of a truck with a horde of the undead – this woman makes it through the movie while sustaining very slight injuries that go away almost immediately with no repercussion.
The other huge flaw of this movie is the incredibly fast-paced editing on display during every dangerous fight scene. Every time there is a fight between two characters, it is almost impossible to see some of the action taking place because the camera jump cuts back-and-forth between characters’ facial expressions without sufficiently revealing their movements. The action is still very entertaining, but it loses its effect when viewers cannot see some of the cool moves the hero and villain perform in combat.
However, even with these two big flaws in the movie, the film itself is a lot of fun to watch and features some really nice moments that audience members may not suspect. Moviegoers who are fans of the “Resident Evil” franchise will appreciate “The Final Chapter” as an excellent conclusion to a monumental series, while newcomers unfamiliar with the story so far may find some plot points confusing. But this shouldn’t stop the uninitiated from seeing “The Final Chapter” in theaters: the action sequences it showcases, while flawed, stand above the action sequences in a majority of other action films of today.
jkirstei@ramapo.edu
