Sometimes filmmakers have more story than one film can hold.  Hence, Kill Bill, the original Star Wars trilogy and Gone with the Wind and Gone with the Wind 2: Rhett’s Revenge.

More often than not, filmmakers seemingly have more pocket than talent, since they need to keep filling them with loot from punters who should know better than to spend money on film #5 in a never-ending series. And since this one made almost $300,000,000 on a budget of $60,000,000, you do the math….

Sadly and not unexpectedly, such is the case of the new Resident Evil: Retribution.  The first couple of movies were actually kinda fun in a totally mindless sort of way.  Lots of gore, some good wire-work stunts, and hordes of zombies and other creepy genetic mutations.  If you can look past Milla Jovovich’s uh, “interesting” line readings of not completely awful dialogue and utter inability to use her eyes as part of her acting repertoire, you might enjoy sitting through Resident Evil and the first(and to a lesser extent, second) sequel.  In Retribution, her acting chops still don’t get much of a workout.  But there’s less and less story with which to work, so it ends up just being boring.

I will say, the movie looks gorgeous. The backgrounds are well rendered CGI, and the effects are pretty damn good.  Unfortunately, what happens in the foreground can’t compare. And can we please turn down the score on ALL movies nowadays? I’m glad I didn’t pay the extra $23.50 for IMAX xD 3-D Blastovision, because I’d be a deaf and blind basket case with a pantsload of evacuated bowels.  It was like having Mike Ditka and Jesse Ventura on either side of you screaming in your ears til they bled.  Your ears, not Mike and Jesse.

For a “zombie” movie, this is surprisingly bereft of zombies, just like Afterlife.  It’s more about the action/thriller elements, and less about the zombies, which is a shame.  Even the mutants, which were pretty cool in previous iterations, don’t get much screen-time.  And the screen-time they do get seems contrived with the sole purpose of having the actors talk less.  Which actually is a good thing when your actors are Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Sienna Guillory.  It was really obvious that a good deal of their dialogue was looped in later, and Guillory’s in particular seems like it was completely dubbed….

Retribution picks up right where Afterlife left off.  And like Afterlife, the first 5 minutes are the most compelling, instilling a false sense of hope that this is gonna be good.  The problem is, the first 5 minutes of this is the last 5 minutes of Afterlife, played backwards and in slo-mp.  Huh?! It looks incredible, but makes zero sense.

The earth is mostly overrun with Umbrella zombies and mutant animals. Alice is captive by Jill Valentine, another Umbrella employee, in yet another clandestine Umbrella Corporation compound, this one under the ice in northern Russia.  The Red Queen computer is still intent on wiping out humanity, making thousands of clones of Alice, Rain and other recurring characters to test-run scenarios for viral outbreaks in life-sized simulators of various metropolitan downtown areas–NYC, Tokyo, Moscow, Berlin, DC–and a generic suburbia.  Which seems sort of pointless at this juncture, seeing as how most of the planet is a wasteland warzone that has already been devastated by Umbrella.

We get a weirdly placed scene in suburbia where an Alice clone has a family, including a young daughter, and domestic bliss is upended by a seemingly sudden zombie outbreak, which is very poorly ripped off from the Dawn of the Dead remake.  Where as that had some genuine tension and a good sense of “WTF is happening here,” this is one is just big and loud, and since we’ve already seen it done better before, it has no impact.

Alice then awakens back in her cell.  It makes it seem as if the previous scene was a dream, or was she channeling some long distant memory, or was it just a clumsily handled cinematic staging area to set up later action? Gee, I dunno….

Soon Alice is joined by Ada Wong, a former Umbrella operative now working independently for Wesker, who in the last movie was trying to capture and disarm Alice, but now for no apparent reason wants to help her escape from Umbrella, and to enlist her in the fight against the monstrosities Umbrella has unleashed. Remember, we’re in a bio-engeering and paramilitary facility in sub-Arctic Russia, and Ada is rocking high heels and a super skimpy cocktail dress with a hip high slit.  Makes sense if you’re a 14 year old boy in your parents’ basement, but much less so if you’re not.

Wesker has a strike team en route to break in and help them escape.  Meanwhile, Alice and Ada fight their way through the simulations, engaging in a boss battle with not one but two super-sized Axmen.  Again, the fight is too stagy for the sake of being stagy.  There’s no sense of urgency to it–you know they are both getting out alive, and these are just two 12 foot tall speed bumps with 500 pound sledgehammers.

They end up in the suburbia simulation, where Alice finds the “daughter” of her clone.  She brings the girl along, Ada gets captured, and Alice meets up with the strike team. They get in a car chase, weaving through “Moscow” while a big 30 foot tall dog with no skin and its brain outside its skull pursues them.  It looks cool, but so what? Yeah, we know.  Gonna get away. Again. They make their way out, blowing up and flooding the facility in the process.

The strike team of five is whittled down to two, plus Alice and the girl.  They make their way across the Arctic ice in a Bearcat.  Jill Valentine ambushes them after they reach the surface by crashing a submarine through the ice, of course.  Jill injects a Rain clone with the T-virus, and its a fight to the death, until Alice shatters the ice she’s standing on and all the zombies that were floating to the surface after the explosion consumer her.

There’s an epilogue where Wesker has made the bombed-out White House his base of operations, injects Alice with the T-virus again, and tells her she is the last line of defense.  The camera pulls out to show DC completely overrun and burning, zombies and weird Lovecraftian bat creatures everywhere.  Gee, think there’s gonna be another movie?