Star Rating:

Resident Evil: Retribution

Director: Paul WS Anderson

Actors: Michelle Rodriguez

Release Date: Monday 30th November -0001

Genre(s): Fantasy, Sci-Fi

Running time: 96 minutes

Well aware that most of its audience probably haven't sat through all of Resident Evil - Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Resident Evil: Extinction and Resident Evil: Afterlife (seriously, who is naming these movies?) - Resident Evil: Retribution opens with the climax of the previous film, quickly followed by a five minute catch-up montage on what has happened in the series so far. This fast-forward through the four movies reminds us all just how terrible they were, and that we now have more to look forward to. Fantastic.

Alice (Milla Jovovich) wakes up to find she has a perfect husband and an adorable daughter, only for it all to be shattered by the inexplicable arrival of zombies. A quick rip-off of the opening scene from the Dawn Of The Dead remake later, and Alice discovers that she is actually in a virtual reality world built in an abandoned submarine base under an ice-cap in Northern Russia. That's right; the movies about zombies based on the games about zombies are now about someone IN a game about zombies. But it gets better; as the evil Umbrella Corporation has been taken over by The Red Queen, a computer programme who inexplicably wants to bring an end to the human race, Alice must escape the base alive if she wants to continue helping mankind survive the zombie onslaught.

The plot, in case you haven't noticed, makes absolutely no sense. There are returning characters from previous movies, who have DIED, but are brought back here with very poorly thought out reasons (Michelle Rodriguez and Oded Fehr are both good and evil clones of their former selves, because … why not?). The trailer and the poster sell the movie as "Evil Goes Global", and we see the zombie threat in New York, Moscow and Tokyo, but the whole thing is fake, making it even harder to care about.

The acting is terrible, the script is awful and the soundtrack is overbearing and grating. At one point in the movie, Alice is in a big white room, being tortured with loud noises, with no reason given.

When this movie is over, you will know exactly how that feels.