All Okay Franchises Must Come To An End (until they're rebooted one year later)

Paul W.S. Anderson's Resident Evil series will never go down in history as being the Nightmare On Elm Street of its time, but it would be incredibly wrong to discount some of its achievements. Coming out the same year as 28 Days Later, it took an ambitious step in embracing zombies in an age that hadn't seen an undead hit in over a decade. More importantly, from the very beginning, the movies made an admirable and genuinely successful effort to include not one but always two badass female action heroes. 

Milla Jovovich has such a clear affection for this franchise, and it has shown itself onscreen for six full films. Though the actual products ultimate range in quality and never quite hit the highest tier of horror, that in itself carries them to being something special in their own way. 

Quick Plot: For a series of action horror flicks based on a video game, there's a surprising lack of easy plotting when it comes to most Resident Evil movies. This is perhaps best encompassed by Alice's narrated prologue montage...which takes a full five minutes.

Here's my incredibly concise rundown of what I remember thus far of the first 5 RE films:

Part 1: Alice has amnesia and excellent fashion sense. There's a Cube-like hallway that slices up people, zombies, zombie dogs, hologram British girl, a super angry Michelle Rodriquez, and a Day of the Dead homage at the end.

Part 2, Apocalypse: Everything and everyone is stupid in Raccoon City. No more Cube things, but still zombies, zombie dogs, some sort of zombie giant hybrid monster, and a pimp

\

Part 3, Extinction: Las Vegas is covered by zombies. Ali Larter helps Alice kill said zombies. I remember nothing else.

Part 4, Something: Wentworth Miller joins the group. I remember nothing.

Part 5: Clone Wars: THERE ARE CLONES! AND THE LITTLE GIRL FROM ORPHAN! AND MICHELLE RODRIGUEZ...es. It's kind of delightful. 

The only odd thing? It ends, and Part 6 starts, and as far as I can tell, nothing that happened in that one matters.

So here we are, in the swan song of Paul W.S. Anderson's epic (ignoring the fact that a week after I watched this, less than a year after it debuted, it was announced that the series would be rebooted because this is 2017 and we let nothing die). Alice finally has the chance to save the world by releasing an antivirus that would kill all the undead, zombie dogs, zombie pterodactyls, and whatever other CGI creations have been unleashed. 

Alice re-teams with Claire, who now has a new band of feisty (and mostly ill-fated) survivors. Together, they scale through an army of Jorah Mormont clones, zombies, industrial fans, and the return of the Cube-inspired chamber that still makes no sense. 

Look, I'll be honest with you: I am not the person to go to for any kind of sensical recap of what happens in the Resident Evil movies. While I proudly paid to see the first three in the theaters, I've never watched them in full since. I watched parts 4 & 5 (or "the bland Wentworth Miller one" and "the clone one," as I like to call them) off of a recorded SyFy airing while doing other things, like playing Words With Friends or, you know, writing reviews of horror films. I am no expert in Alice's Adventures in Raccoon City. 

That doesn't take too much annoyance out of my sails when Part 6 opens up with no reference to what happened to the few survivors left from The One With the Little Girl From Orphan Who Wasn't the Orphan. Again, I'll fully admit that I might have just missed something, but...did I? Or does Part 6 just start fairly fresh?

I'll put that mild annoyance aside because you know what? The Final Chapter is pretty fun. Unlike most of the other ones, the plot is fairly straightforward with few complications, making it all the more pleasurable to sit back and watch Milla Jovovich wrestle genetically engineered monster thingies. Seriously, if there is one thing Milla Jovovich is good at, it's wrestling genetically engineered monster thingies.

Said monster thingies are never that special (it's been a week since I've watched the movies and I'm having a hard time remembering a thing about any of them) and most of the non-Alice/Claire/Jorah Mormont characters blend into the background so well that I'd believe it if you told me they were also computer generated. But anybody that comes into a Resident Evil movie expecting much more than that hasn't learned a lesson in the last 15 years. 

High Points

It's the high point for all six films, but come on: Resident Evil's commitment to making its female characters heroic and strong warriors is something special

Low Points

That very small part of my brain hung up on things like logic couldn't accept it 15 years ago, and still can't quite let it go: it's a chamber with the ability to laser cut living matter in any configuration, so why, seriously WHY does it not just, you know, LASER CUT IN ONE PASS?

Lessons Learned

Nail guns are cost-effective weapons when fighting zombie hordes

Skyline transportation is not an advisable means of travel in the early stages of a zombie apocalypse

The nice thing about the future is that hands are easily replaceable. The less nice thing is, you know, the zombie apocalypse

Rent/Bury/Buy

As another entry in the Resident Evil series, The Last Chapter is perfectly solid entertainment. As the grand finale of a 15 years-in-the-making 6-film franchise, it's adequate. As a chance to watch Milla Jovovich wear leather and kick ass, it's kind of glorious.  

Roman Holiday

Maybe it all began with Sonic the Hedgehog, but I've always found volcanoes to be, rather naturally, absolutely horrific. The Pompeii eruption that destroyed an entire city way back when is certainly good fodder for the big budget treatment. All it needed, apparently, was a lot of abs.

Quick Plot: It's 500 A.D., and unless you're a miscast Kiefer Sutherland playing a Roman senator, life sucks.

Slaves are sent to the gladiator arenas to die in forgettable glory.

Business folks are forced to make bad deals to secure some kind of stability.

Hot daughters of business people must marry miscast Kiefer Sutherlands.

Oh, and there's a massive volcano set to destroy the entire city via lava, tidal waves, earth fractures, fireballs, rubble collapses, and unhinged miscast Kiefer Sutherlands.

Can anyone catch a break?

Pompeii is a big budget disaster pic that basically asks the question, how can we squeeze a PG-13 rated Gladiator into 100 minutes of Independence Day (or 2012, or whatever your modern CGI-infused apocalypse is of choice). Directed by Resident Evil godfather Paul W.S. Anderson, it tells an extremely familiar story with streamlined efficiency. Consider the cast of characters:
 
Handsome hero with a childhood grudge, insanely chiseled physique, and secret heart of gold

Lovable sidekick who will start out as our handsome hero's rival before accepting a supporting role and sacrificing himself for the whiter handsome hero he recently befriended

Beautiful poor little rich girl with a conscience and amazing ability to keep her pre-Cover Girl makeup perfectly smudge-proof

Evil, just unrepentant evil villain and his taller right hand man

Everyone's mostly British, because, you know, OLD TIMES. All the villains get their comeuppance, all the helpful but less white supporting cast member die semi-heroically, and the booming soundtrack pauses not once but TWICE when our handsome hero upon his horse has to leap over what could be certain death, only to land safely and cue up the horn section with his triumph.

You don't go into Pompeii expecting innovation. You expect, and receive, all the grape-chewing baddie sneers, the impossible combat scenes that only our hero and sidekick can survive, and computer printed lava raining down upon scores of extras wearing recycled garbs from Rome. To its credit, the movie doesn't really wimp out on delivering the complete wipe-out of a city and its people. There's no Pierce Brosnan or Tommy Lee Jones dispatched to evacuate a plucky band of deserving survivors. This is a historic volcano that annihilated everything in its path.

But hey, the people are still really, really pretty. And the not-quite Spartacus gladiator scenes are sort of the equivalent of saying, "I love a fine boiled lobster served with garlic mashed potatoes in a five-star restaurant but can also enjoy Long John Silver's deep fried cod and basic french fries." This movie isn't better than it could have been, but it's as good as it should have been for being, you know, a mid-big budget PG-13 historical action romp about a volcano.

High Points
Considering the bulk of IMDB's trivia section focuses on it, I don't see why I shouldn't: Kit Harington is typically weighed down by furs and Night's Watch robes on Game of Thrones, so while it may sound crass and shallow to compliment his inhuman 12-pack of a stomach, Pompeii's lingering camera gaze practically begs anyone watching with eyes to say, "wow, that dude really worked out for this movie."

Low Points
It seems like there should be an edict against casting Jared Harris and Carrie-Anne Moss and not giving either anything interesting to do

Lessons Learned
It is shockingly possible to pick a lock with a splinter while chained to a carriage going at least 35 MPH

A man who cries is a man who cannot haggle

Ravenousing (i.e., acting dead when mistakenly tossed in a giant pile of corpses and waiting hours to emerge) is a time honored tactic for surviving massacres

Rent/Bury/Buy
Look, Pompeii isn't a good film, but it's fun and knows exactly what its audience wants. The DVD includes a bevvy of deleted scenes, so a cheap or rented copy won't bore you too badly.

Plus, this: