Resident Evil: The Final Chapter review – more dull and deafening antics

The violence keeps coming in this movie, but, if there’s one thing more devastatingly brutal than the law of the jungle, it’s the law of diminishing returns. The sixth film in the Resident Evil franchise might pick up some farewell-tour custom by calling itself The Final Chapter, but the ending naturally leaves things open for a seventh. Just as Kate Beckinsale climbed back into the skintight leathers for another Underworld outing, so Milla Jovovich is back in residence for yet another high-impact action thriller set in a gruesome zombified world, with Iain Glen reprising his turn as the creepy megalomaniac scientist. There’s a great deal of yucky horror-violence testing the limit of that 15 certificate. It often features Jovovich on a motorbike roaring sexily, endlessly, across a post-apocalyptic landscape where petrol supplies apparently aren’t a problem. As ever, this Resident Evil is about cloning and corporate duplicity and people getting savagely beaten, and it mashes up Night of the Living Dead and Mad Max. Jovovich and Glen do their best with what they’re given, and the digital rendering of that wrecked vista of Washington DC is impressive, but in dramatic terms it’s as perfunctorily presented as everything else. Another deafening, boring episode.