To try to summarize the entire backstory here for those coming late to the party would be futile, if only because the series is still revealing key background details even at this late date. Suffice it to say, the insanely far-reaching and simply insane Umbrella Corporation developed a miraculous vaccine called the T-virus that had the unfortunate side effect of transforming those exposed to it into zombies, mutants and the like. After the virus was accidentally unleashed, Alice was part of a team sent into Umbrella’s headquarters in Raccoon City to clean things up and despite killing hordes of the creatures trapped inside the building, the virus eventually escaped and turned most of the world’s population into creatures for Alice and the fellow survivors she would come across on her travels to reduce into 1’s and 0’s before our eyes. At the conclusion of the last episode, Alice found herself in a bombed-out Washington D.C. joining forces with her mortal enemy, Umbrella bigwig Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), to stop the Umbrella AI unit known as The Red Queen from eliminating humanity once and for all.
Apparently deciding that continuity is another thing that needs to be eliminated, “The Final Chapter” then goes on to ignore that setup entirely by starting off with Alice waking up in the ruins of the White House after being betrayed once again by Wesker and being offered the chance by the Red Queen (Ever Anderson, the real-life daughter of Anderson and Jovovich) to save the remaining 4500 uninfected people on the planet by breaking back into Umbrella Corp.headquarters to steal the only vial of an airborne antidote that will kill anything infected with the T-virus (which would include Alice herself) and unleash it in 48 hours. Although most of that time ends up being wasted as she is sidetracked by one thing or another, she eventually gets there with a small group of fellow survivors that include familiar face Clare Redfield (Ali Larter) and a bunch of newbies (including one played by Ruby Rose, who is apparently going to be in every single action movie sequel coming out this season) and penetrates the defenses of Umbrella one last time to retrieve the antidote, save humanity and, time permitting, get a few answers about what has been going on and her place in it all.
The critic in me must admit that, compared to the delightfully delirious excesses of “Retribution”—a film that so often crossed the border into pure surrealism that to describe it as Bunuelian would not have been entirely out of bounds—“The Final Chapter” is a little too staid at times for its own good. Having already given viewers a wild mashup of the entire saga in “Retribution,” Anderson has elected to close things out with a storyline that is as boilerplate as can be and which cannot help but pale in comparison to the more ambitious and outlandish narratives of the prior outings. The film also lacks a certain ambition in regard to the action sequences and visual style—while previous entries saw Anderson merging a surprisingly elegant cinematic sheen with the unbridled enthusiasm of a small child conjuring up breathless narratives with his toys into eye candy of a gourmet variety, too many of the action beats here are on the rote side and shot in such a dark and murky manner that it is sometime hard to discern what is going on at certain times. And while I suspect that no one will be too surprised that the ending does offer the possibility for future installments, Anderson leaves so many doors open in the end that you wonder why he even bothered to claim it as the conclusion in the first place.
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