Oh goodie, Paul W. S. Anderson has found another video game franchise he can milk dry. Yeah, suffice it to say, I wasn’t really looking forward to this one largely because of his attachment to it (although, as I’ll get into, his isn’t the only name that spells trouble for this whole thing). Having sat through his last film with Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, easily one of the messiest and incoherent action films of the 2010s, if not ever, I went into this expecting the same level of aggrandising clutter. And yet, while that is certainly what I got out of this, this is the first film I’ve seen from Anderson in a long time where I find myself debating if this film is still entertaining in spite of his… eccentricities, let’s say.
Let’s start with the main crux of the film: The action scenes and the frame-encompassing monsters therein. The effects work on the kaiju is pretty damn good, definitely selling the size and sheer threat they bring to the proceedings, the weaponry and tactics involved show a good mixture of classic video game RPG equipment and real-world hunting tricks, and the fight choreography between the humans (namely Milla Jovovich and Tony Jaa) is highly engaging and energetic.
However, something stands in the way of enjoying those moments too much, and sure enough, it’s the same problem as with Final Chapter: The editing. Watching Doobie White’s efforts to cut all these shots together gives the impression that his name also corresponds to the two main ingredients that might’ve influenced him into thinking any of this looks good. At its worst, it’s like rapidly blinking but with a different image every time your eyes re-open, making even the better action beats hard to follow through the disorientation. The fact that I could even make out the choreography is kind of miraculous, as it would’ve taken something truly finessed to poke its head out through something this atrociously overedited.
There’s also Anderson’s writing to contend with, both in the dialogue and in the main narrative. To the point where saying that this even contains a narrative feels disingenuous, as it’s more like a series of set pieces strung together with some token moments of character interaction (not development, just interaction). And while those sequences are fun, like the opening desert pirate scene, or the dark cave full of giant ‘lay eggs in your chest’ spiders, or the introductory throwdown between Jovovich and Jaa, all the bland-as-fyuck military tropes and recitations of They Say That In The Army, or even the throwaway line of Jovovich’s Artemis calling her platoon “ladies” and her still making that sound like an insult (yes, draw attention to how tired your writing is; great move(!)) take the fun out of things pretty damn quick. The tired language barrier gags don’t help either.
And in case all of this doesn’t sound familiar enough to those who survived sitting through the Resident Evil series, Anderson is still on his kick of writing his wife to be the single greatest person in any film narrative she exists in. She enters the world of Monsters with a platoon, but none of them survive past the half-hour mark, and despite the presence of Jaa and even Ron Perlman later on, she ends up doing most of the hunting herself. Now, at least in this case, I can kind of excuse that mode of writing, since you’d need to beef up a main character who can take on Godzilla-tier creatures with blade weapons… but when it gets to the point when she basically brings herself back from the dead (and this is before she starts monster hunting in earnest), it still reeks of Anderson artificially stacking the deck to make her wife into the coolest person in the world. Not that I don’t understand the sentiment, but you could’ve made it a little less obvious.
What all this amounts to is an otherwise fun rollercoaster ride that the conductor can not get out of his own way to steer effectively. All his trademark quirks, from the hyperactive framing to the Mary Sue writing to his complete inability to actually end a story, keep standing between the audience and them engaging with the grand scope of the action scenes, the welcome casting, and the way it emulates the standard ‘dropped into the middle of the action and you have to fight your way out of it’ video game conceit on the big screen in surprisingly effective fashion.
It’s a rarity in Paul W. S. Anderson’s catalogue, in that I’m beyond being annoyed with the thing and more concerned with how close I am to truly liking what he’s made here. It certainly doesn’t make its source material look any worse for wear by proximity, which is a step-up from the RE films, but if Anderson is going to use this as his newest series springboard, he needs to improve. Or at the very least, he needs to bring in someone who can edit footage together without recurring deliveries from Snowflame.
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