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With every release of the Resident Evil series, we have come to expect one thing, and one thing only. Balls-out zombie ass-kicking by Milla Jovovich.

Forget story. Forget character development. Park your brain at home, and watch Milla Jovovich as Alice move from point A to point B whilst dispatching zombies with athletic grace and parading the tightest outfits ever made (probably something to do with aero-dynamics of zombie killing).

The “story” of Resident Evil: Retribution picks up where Afterlife left off, with Alice and a bunch of survivors on the Arcadia, facing a brain-washed Jill Valentine and an army of Umbrella Corp minions’ impending aerial attack.

After a very cool slo-mo reverse action sequence and an alternate reality-clone scenario, we find out that original Alice had been captured by Umbrella in that attack, and is being housed in a remote testing facility underwater in Russia. She breaks out of her cell with the help of Albert Wesker and Ada Wong, who reveals that the Red Queen had fully taken control of Umbrella and bent on destroying what’s left of humanity.

Wesker, realising that he is also considered “what’s left of humanity”, wisely defects to Team Alice and now wants to play good.

The underground facility is a sprawling testing ground for infection rates, and houses several replicas of towns such as Racoon City, New York, Tokyo and Moscow (thereby ensuring the cast gets to go on a paid holiday to said locales). Alice and Ada now needs to move to the different locales to rendezvous with an extraction team before escaping.

This sets the action in motion, allowing various action set-pieces in the different locations (and enabling the tagline “Evil goes Global”)

This sequel features an upgrade of the zombies to “intelligent” zombies able to drive vehicles and operate machine guns. While i’m not keen on super-powered Alice and hyper-intelligent zombies (which is why I thought the 3rd movie Extinction to be the worst in the series thus far) , the ending frame teasing the possible finale does seem pretty awesome and promising.

After 5 movies spanning 10 years, its good to see Milla still kicking ass and looking good.

Rating: 7/10 (Actually 6, but +1 for bringing back the hospital paper-towel outfit)

Umbrella Corp sure has a titillating fashion sense