Disclaimer: Contains spoilers!
Plot Summary: In this fifth entry, Alice finds herself in yet another "wonderland" as she must escape an Umbrella Corp. facility.
Review: To be honest, I have no idea what is going on anymore in these movies; wait, let me rephrase, I don't think the makers have any idea what is going on anymore. It's as if every movie they just throw into a hat characters and scenes from the video game series and whatever they pull out they find a way to work into the films. So all those characters we saw at the end of part four, they just leave out, unexplained, with the exception of one guy to kill off; this isn't new as they've been basically doing this the whole franchise. In exchange, we get a few more famous game characters to even out the ranks while mindlessly bringing back characters, probably to make the trailer look cool, rather than make any sense. Speaking of which, they couldn't even get our beloved characters right. Leon, from the RE2 and RE4 games, says something about ditching some little girl who thinks she's Alice's daughter; wow, how ridiculous considering he's the one character that spent an entire game trying to rescue a girl! How are there still this many Umbrella facilities in the world? How is there this much human fodder considering I thought humanity was all but dead by part three? So the facility can make clones...great, but why would it conveniently only make clones of people in Alice's life? And no, they were not cloned deliberately to screw with Alice because that plot point never even came up. We have random plot elements like the Las Plagas occur with no explanation unless you've played the games; even then, they just do whatever they want with the source material so now Las Plagas makes you like invincible? Probably the dumbest part to this whole movie is toward the end when Wesker, who magically survived part four, gives Alice back her powers. This is so dumb I can't even explain it! You write yourself into a corner with a character so powerful she can't reasonably be stopped, then write out her powers to ground the story back into reality, only to give her those powers right back?! Paul W.S. Anderson you fucking hack! I swear this film, and franchise for that matter, is so loaded with contivances, stupidity, and bad writing it makes me want to kill someone! But despite of all this frustration, I will admit the movie was entertaining and had a lot of cool action. My favorite thing was just seeing Li Bingbing play Ada Wong (probably the only reason I even rated this so high). Not only does she look so unbelievably sexy, she IS the character. I could not possibly imagine anyone else as the character now because she just works on every level. I'm not sure about the voice though, because her english was too good considering I know Ms. Li has an accent. Some are speculating she was dubbed, but her voice does sound like her usual but cleaned up somehow. Maybe she just really beefed up her english skills over the last couple years? In the end, if you like this franchise, then you will probably like this much better than the last entry. It is a solid action film if you are okay with virtually no story and definitely no story progression to the overall mythos. I prefer the games so to each their own. I had planned on reviewing the rest of the films to lead into this, but this plot is so annoying I can't bring myself to touch on the others for a while.
Notable Moment: When Ada and Alice must fight two giant "axemen."
Final Rating: 5.5/10
She IS Ada...and a sexy Ada at that!
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