If you ask me (which maybe you are if you’re here – maybe you’re just curious) Resident Evil: Afterlife was a way better movie.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, this was a decent enough movie, a little better than Resident Evil: Extinction and well way better than Resident Evil: Apocalypse.  But I digress.  This movie was way to short, only an hour and a half.  There was no room in this movie to allow a full return for the characters that we saw in the trailer.  I mean there was Rain (played by Michelle Rodriguez) and Jill Valentine (played by Sienna Guillory), but as for the others who “returned” yeah, they were given little to no dialogue and it sucked.  That was what I was most excited about!  Also, this late in the game, I have to agree with with IGN said:

“Even with all of its dopey dialogue, wooden characters and ‘been there, done that’ elements, Resident Evil: Retribution is pretty amazing as far as entries in this series go. It’s certainly feels more like a video game and has a bit more emotion to it than some of the past Resident Evil sequels, but if you don’t like this series then there’s not much here to make you suddenly warm up to it..”

The movie did feel more like a video game than an actual story.  There wasn’t a lot of dialogue and there could have been way more action within this movie.  I mean, over all I was okay with the lack of dialogue because it gave the movie a more campy feel.  There was so much emotion and the facial gestures were, admittedly, awesome.  They gave the characters (who were focused on – let me specify that) more depth and a better way to make the story move on because lets face it, five movies later, we know the drill, zombies.  So how does one continue something like this.  Add a good story and make it action packed, you’ve got the characters spot on, they no longer need any improvement, acting and characterization is awesome, but focus on the story and bring in more action.  Changing the format from story oriented (which is why is has been so good and lasted so long) to video game oriented this late in the game was more damaging to this franchise than anything.  Let’s face it, the crew got lazy with this one a bit. 

BUT there was something that made this movie so worth it.  The cat-fight between Alice and Jill was AMAZING!  It was nice to see a good fight between those two and it was nice to see Alice meet her match and literally pull out all the punches to fight for her life.  And Rain beating up Leon and Luther was also amazing.  Seriously, that fight sequence in the end was the best part of the whole freaking movie!  Saved it…a bit.  2/5 ★‘s and a “C-“.