Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)
★★ — Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)
Fifteen years. Six films. And this is how it ends. With a shrug.
I've stuck with the Resident Evil series through all its lurches and detours, from the reasonably tense original through the increasingly unhinged sequels. I even had a soft spot for the gonzo excess of Resident Evil: Retribution, which at least committed to its own madness with a kind of deranged confidence. The Final Chapter, though, arrives under the weight of everything that came before it and immediately buckles. It promises a grand reckoning, Alice versus Umbrella, the whole saga wrapped up with purpose and finality. What we actually get is a breathless, incoherent sprint that mistakes volume for momentum.
There are moments early on that flicker with genuine energy. A motorcycle chase through a wasteland packed with the undead is loud, kinetic and occasionally inventive, the kind of sequence the series has always done decently when it stops trying to be clever. But even here, the editing is so frantic and the spatial geography so muddled that it's hard to get any real grip on what's happening or why it should matter. That problem never really goes away.
Characters reappear with little or no explanation. Motivations flip without warning. Emotional beats that the series spent years building towards, reunions, sacrifices, revelations, all of them land like wet fireworks. There's a twist near the end, a revelation about Alice's identity that's clearly meant to reframe her entire journey and send audiences out on a gut-punch. Instead it arrives too late, too rushed, and too thinly sketched to land with any real force. You can see what they were going for. You just can't feel it.
Milla Jovovich, for her part, throws herself into it completely. She's never been less than committed across this franchise, and that commitment is visible here even when the script is letting her down badly. But Alice as written in this final chapter is more emblem than person, a symbol of resilience without the interiority to make her conclusion feel earned. Her arc doesn't conclude so much as it just stops.
Visually it's a mixed bag. Some practical sets do real work grounding the chaos in something tactile and physical. But too much of the film leans on murky digital backdrops and weightless CGI that drain the tension rather than build it. There's a flatness to the peril that's hard to shake. Compare it to something like Resident Evil: Extinction (2007), which for all its faults had a genuinely oppressive atmosphere and a sense of geography to its set pieces. The Final Chapter often just feels like noise.
The plotting is where it really falls apart. The story is equal parts rushed and convoluted, which is an impressive combination of sins. It manages to feel both overstuffed and undercooked simultaneously, cramming in lore and reversals while skipping past the character work that might have made any of it matter. Key questions the series raised get answered in throwaway lines or ignored entirely. For a finale, it has a startling lack of interest in the history it's supposedly concluding.
I don't want to be entirely uncharitable. There are pockets of ambition here, ideas about identity and survival and what it costs to keep fighting that a sharper, less harried film might have developed into something worthwhile. But The Final Chapter never has the patience or the confidence to sit with any of them. It's too busy rushing to its finish line to notice that it's not actually arriving anywhere satisfying.
Two stars. After everything this series asked of its audience, the least it owed us was an ending that felt like it meant something. Instead it closes the book on Alice's story not with catharsis but with convenience. Fans of the franchise deserved better. Milla Jovovich deserved better. Even by the lowered expectations of this particular series, it's a disappointment.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2016 | Watched: 2026-04-26
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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