By Roger Moore
FILM: Resident Evil: Retribution
CAST: Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory, Michelle Rodriguez, Oded Fehr, Bingbing Li, Aryana Engineer
DIRECTION: Paul W S Anderson
Five films, over $660mn at the worldwide box office ... you have to hand it to Resident Evil. In 10 years, it has become — while few who enjoy good films have noticed — the most successful video-game film franchise in history.
These movies have kept action-horror hack Paul W S Anderson in business and sustained model-turned-actress Milla Jovovich in between her other rare appearances on the big screen.
The movies? To a one, violent, bloodbaths, badly written, flatly acted. At least last time, in Resident Evil: Afterlife, they seemed to spend some money and expand their vision of the combat zone, which resulted in a bigger, more action-packed and by far more successful exercise in first-person shooter mayhem.
Anderson returns to the director’s chair for the third time. He gives us a film with three different openings — a rewind-the-last-film prologue, with bio-altered “security expert” Alice (Jovovich) getting us up to date on the first four films
“At last,” she narrates, “we thought we had survived the horror.”
But no. An imaginary Alice as housewife-mom is assaulted by zombies, followed by that inevitable moment when Alice wakes up, nearly naked, in a vast over-lit room where the Umbrella Corp has her stashed. These movies never let us forget that Jovovich is easy on the eyes.
You will remember that Umbrella Corp made its billions off bio-weapons, and one virus busted out of Raccoon City and turned the Earth into Planet Zombie, with Alice the last semi-human hope of saving the last of humanity.
In Retribution, Alice is back in a super-secret Umbrella facility tasked with fighting her way out through various levels, “protocols,” basically gamescapes that recreate a zombie apocalypse in New York, suburbia, Tokyo and Moscow. Ada (Bingbing Li) is to be her guide. Valentine (Sienna Guillory) and Rain (big-screen tough-girl Michelle Rodriguez) are trying to stop her.
And a SWAT team is working its way into the facility to help her out.
As a few of her other films attest, Jovovich can still act, though you’d never know it from these bullets-and-bustiers pictures. She handles action choreography well, doesn’t ruin the few feeble one-liners Anderson writes for her and summons up a moment or two of lip-quivering fear in the film’s opening. But it’s a flat performance, a still-fit woman looking exhausted at playing shoot-’em-up in a movie where empathy, plot and character development were sacrificed, if they were ever there to start with.
Anderson stages some of the bloodier brawls in bright, white futuristic hallways of chrome and plastic — the blood shows up redder. He busies up the screen with computer graphics to show Alice being monitored as she makes her way out.
And he fills Alice’s field of fire with zombies, giants and alien-esque beasties for her to shoot, torch, decapitate or impale. The violence in Retribution is impersonal, gory and non-stop.
Which, due to the digital world of film these days, may be the fate of Resident Evil and Jovovich in it. It may never stop.
Game becomes film
FILM: Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn
CAST: Tom Green, Anna Popplewell and Enisha Brewster
DIRECTION: Stewart Hendler
Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn has successfully translated the Halo video game franchise to the small screen.
The movie has a very “made for TV” feel to it and, for the most part, all of its actors are relatively unknown. However, with few exceptions, most of them give great performances. While the film drags a bit during its first two episodes, this portion is necessary to set up the tension and action that fills its latter half.
Make no mistake though, Forward Unto Dawn is a web film split into five distinct portions and not an actual theatrical release. Microsoft and 343 Industries have released all of the episodes of this $10mn series, combined together to create a film released on DVD last week. I viewed each episode, as part of a special screening in Toronto.
Most Halo fans, especially those expecting the action the video game franchise is known for, will be turned off by the slow pacing of the beginning of the movie. It follows cadet Lasky, a character who actually makes an appearance in Halo 4, as he struggles to find his place in the UNSC military.
Without giving too much away, Lasky has difficulty following orders and gaining the respect of his peers. There is also a bit of romantic tension between Lasky and another UNSC cadet, Chyler, thrown into the mix in the middle of the movie.
It isn’t until the second half of the film that it starts to pick up. The iconic Master Chief, played by Vancouver’s Daniel Cudmore, is appropriately robotic and acts just how you’d expect him to in the film, taking chances, saving cadets and making heroic gestures. Thankfully, Steve Downes, the voice of the Master Chief in the Halo video games, still does the Chief’s voice acting work.
Surprisingly impressive CG covenant, that look appropriately menacing, also make an appearance. I imagine that much of the film’s budget was put into effects because they look great and have certainly pushed the envelope for what viewers should expect from a web series.
For any long-time fan of the series, seeing the Master Chief, a warthog and various other Halo-related objects, in real life, for the first time, is very exciting.
Even though Forward Unto Dawn is a decent movie, it’s hard not to wonder what Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn could have been if Hollywood got their hands on it. Those Neil Blomkamp Halo shorts from a few years ago were very impressive and while watching Forward Unto Dawn, they were always in the back of my mind. — By Patrick O’Rourke, o.canada.com
Stars bring their years
to Hope Springs
FILM: Hope Springs
CAST: Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Steve Carell
DIRECTION: David Frankel
You’ve never seen Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones quite like this.
As old marrieds facing “intensive” couples counselling over their comatose sexual relationship, two of America’s finest screen actors are by turns silly, befuddled, awkward and confused.
And Hope Springs, the new comedy from the director of The Devil Wears Prada and scripted by a Game of Thrones writer, is all the more amusing for it. Seeing the best in the business act out the no-eye-contact body language, the embarrassment of talking about life’s most intimate details, and alternately grump or whimper about it gives this fluffy comedy a tiny dose of gravitas.
It’s funny, but it’s not the farce you might expect when you learn Steve Carell is the frank, soft-spoken couples counsellor that Kay (Streep) insists that she and Arnold (Jones) visit up in Great Hope Springs, Maine. Carell doesn’t go for laughs. In even tones delivered with barely a hint of humour, he reassures Kay and calms down Arnold.
“Let’s try to keep the conversation descriptive ... and helpful,” Bernard Feld (Carell) counsels.
He has to, because the long-suffering Kay is at the end of her tether. Their kids are grown and she and Arnold haven’t slept in the same bed or even in the same room in ages.
“I want a real marriage again,” she protests.
Arnold the accountant is dismissive, defensive and occasionally funny as he answers her charges, and those of “Bernie.”
“We’re not 22 years old anymore,” he always begins. He always finishes with “We’ve been married 31 years!” As if that wins the argument, hands down.
Jones makes Arnold clipped, gruff, a complainer and a guy who is used to doing most of the talking in this marriage. A guy this cheap doesn’t like being blackmailed into flying to Maine (most of the film was shot in Connecticut). “Anything on this menu that doesn’t have LOBSTER in it?”
Director David Frankel made the maudlin Marley & Me and the sentimental but laugh-starved The Big Year, after breaking out with The Devil Wears Prada. He and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor avoid the easy laughs — none of these Mainers have Down East accents.
The easy laughs they don’t avoid concern sex — sex talk, “experimenting” in marriage, giving voice and action to fantasies, shopping for sexual self-help books and the like. Everybody in town - waitresses, desk clerks, the bartender (Elisabeth Shue) — asks, “Are you guys here for Bernie?” Marriage counselling is their cottage industry.
And there are plenty of clichés - a soundtrack packed with “on the nose” pop tunes, from Everybody Plays the Fool to the romantic works of Al Green and Annie Lennox.
Streep and Jones never break character, never cross the line into “Give me a break.” But there’s a hint of real self-help in Bernie’s advice, and a hint that ‘Hope Springs’ eternal in this stale, worn-out marriage. Not that the old pros acting it out let on that there is. — By Roger Moore, MCT
(DVDs courtesy:
Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha)
