In the Lost Lands (2025)

In a post-apocalyptic future that has turned into something of a weird fiction style fantasy world. Ageless witch Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich) plies her trade in what is apparently the only city left – a hellhole of slavery and inquisition-based religion ruled over by a by now very old Overlord. Alys is hunted by the inquisition, but manages to escape regularly from their clutches, and even the gallows, accidentally putting revolutionary ideas into the heads of the enslaved populace on the way.

For reasons never explained, Alys is bound to fulfil any wish somebody pays her for. The fulfilment of these wishes, as she warns as a matter of course, doesn’t usually work out as pleasantly as her customers hope.

Surprisingly even to Alys, the Overlord’s Queen (Amara Okereke) comes by with a very specific, and somewhat peculiar, wish – she wants to acquire the power of a shapeshifter. To find one to rob of his powers, Alys has to travel into the Lost Lands, the dangerous wastelands surrounding the city. She needs a guide through these places, and chooses the drifter Boyce (Dave Bautista), who just happens to be the secret lover of the Queen. On their travels, fighting their way through various dangers and hunted by a train carrying Alys’s arch enemy, the Inquisition’s main Enforcer (Arly Jover), they do of course fall in love.

In between, we pop in on the Queen and her palace intrigues.

Here I am again, enjoying a Paul W.S. Anderson movie. He’s not always making it easy – his insistence on casting his wife Jovovich who still can’t act her way out of a paper bag is certainly a particular stumbling block for me. But say what you want about the guy, he’s clearly doing the auteur thing where he puts all of his personal obsessions into his movies, and doesn’t give a crap if they are en vogue or not. He’s very much like Wes Anderson in that way, but with more monsters.

Visually, tonight’s Anderson has clearly become fascinated by the colours grey and brown, going for a wasteland so desaturated and woozily shot, the insane spotlight glint in Bautista’s eyes coming with its own lens flare tends to be the most colourful thing on screen. And yes, in Anderson’s world, eye glints have their own intense – and I mean intense - lens flare effect, as have torches, skulls and everything else the polishing-mad wasteland maid I assume roams the place just off-camera has polished to a sheen.

Ill-advised and ugly as it may be, this is certainly a conscious aesthetic decision, making the supposedly ugly post-apocalyptic wasteland indeed pretty damn ugly.

As ugly as his world looks, and as grimdark as things get, there’s a palpable sense of fun here that also made Monster Hunter rather enjoyable. The monsters, the incredible gothic train, the fucking werewolf, the mediaeval Mad Max costumes are all things Anderson clearly has a blast with getting on screen. Quite a bit of that enjoyment makes its way at least to this viewer. Plus, I always appreciate Bautista. See also, rule of cool.

In short: Monster Hunters (2020)

Looking for some missing colleagues, some bad-ass US soldiers under the leadership of one Artemis (Milla Jovovich) drop through a rift in space into a desert full of giant monsters.

It doesn’t take terribly long until Artemis is the last one standing of her team, so it’s lucky for her she meets and eventually – after the usual tensions and miscommunications – teams up with a guy she dubs Hunter (Tony Jaa). There’s more monster fighting, unfunny jokes, and even something akin to a plot for the two to work through eventually.

I know I’m supposed to hate everything Paul W.S. Anderson does, what with all of his films (let’s ignore Event Horizon and that thing with Kurt Russell as early aberrations on the more brainy side, comparatively) being low-brow action, science fiction and horror mash-ups based on video games that aren’t ideally suited to adaptation even at the best of times. His insistence on casting his wife in the lead in every single movie he makes doesn’t make the not hating part easier, given that Jovovich can barely act on the best of days.

However, watching this stint in the playground of Capcom’s Monster Hunter games, I found myself not annoyed by low effort writing (though the script by Anderson himself certainly is nothing to write home about) but started enjoying myself quickly. Watching old Milla, the always lovely Jaa and co fight against various well-realized CG monsters may not be the deepest experience of my movie watching life, but it turns out to be effective popcorn movie fun, with neat monsters, special guest star Ron Perlman, a silly cat person right out of the games, and a well-paced script. Hell, I didn’t even mind Jovovich’s performance here, and found the film’s “so what” shrugging at its source material’s stranger elements pretty charming.

Even better, in this one, Anderson has most of his annoying directorial tics fully under control, not showing even a single scene first backwards in slow motion before repeating it normally, and really giving off the calm, professional directorial air of a guy who has made mid-budget popcorn movies of this type for several decades, and actually knows his business very well indeed; at least this time around.

All of this may not sound like a glowing recommendation, but honestly, Monster Hunter is a fine way to watch people fight giant monsters for hundred minutes or so.

In short: The Three Musketeers (2011)

I think I can spare everyone the plot synopsis. Just imagine the usual Dumas highlights as well as the additions most loved by all other adaptations of the material and add airships and a weird-ass diving suit.

You may have read that Paul W.S. Anderson’s version of the old (but grand) chestnut here is supposed to be not very good, but if you’re me, that’s not a thing that’ll stop you. Even though, in this case, it really, really should have. Now, I’m not a traditional hater of Anderson, and while I absolutely agree with the usual consensus that many of the guy’s films are not very good, I can’t help but respect a director so clearly putting everything he’s got into entertaining his audience. That the filmmaker often seems to believe the audience he is out to entertain has a all the culture of the inhabitants of a monkey cage is a bit unfortunate here, but what can you do?

Even here, Anderson clearly tries to entertain us: there are half a dozen or so relatively loud and somewhat entertaining action sequences in the film, and these are, for what it’s worth, actually pretty fun in an extremely undemanding way. Alas, there is also a version of (parts of the) rather complicated plot of Dumas’s novel, containing rather a large amount of intrigue and dialogue, and here’s where the film completely breaks down, for Anderson clearly has no idea how to stage this sort of thing at all. It doesn’t help that all those parts of the dialogue that aren’t taken word for word from earlier movie versions of the material are some of the most insipid tripe I’ve heard in a long time – and as my imaginary readers know, my tolerance for this sort of thing is usually considerable. Nor does it add to its quality that the film clearly wants to be some kind of cross between the Lester version of the Musketeers and Guy Ritchie’s big damn action approach to Sherlock Holmes; of course, what it tonally actually is,  is what our British friends know as panto, just performed by quite a few theoretically highly capable actors.

In theory, I say, for whether it’s Matthew Macfadyen, Luke Evans, Ray Stevenson, Udo Waltz, Juno Temple, or Mads Mikkelsen, they’re just mugging their way through every single scene, clearly trying to get through this thing as fast as possible, pretending that winking at the audience about how shit the material is will somehow magically improve matters. To add insult to injury, the capable actors stand side by side with decidedly not capable screen personalities Milla Jovovich as the worst Milady, Orlando Bloom as the worst Lord Buckingham and Logan Lerman as the worst D’Artagnan imaginable outside of nightmares so terrible, they would probably be lethal. Particularly Jovovich is so bad, only a director who is married to her would let her get away with it. Wait a minute…


So yeah, this is indeed as horrible as everyone says it is.

Hellboy (2019)

Given the amount of rumours about this being a troubled production where producers, director and actors were all pulling the film into completely different directions (and you know it’s gonna be bad when actors start to believe they can drag a film away from its director), it’s not exactly a surprise that the reboot of the adaptation of Mike Mignola’s great comic universe turns out to be a bad movie. What is a surprise is how bad it is, or rather, how it manages to be bad in basically every single aspect, some of whom the sort of conceptual stuff that can’t be blamed on the actual production but must have been decided early in pre-production.

Why “reboot” the Hellboy movies when you then go on to adapt a storyline taking place late in the comic’s run that really needs about two or three movies worth of preparation to work and simply to make sense on more than the most basic level? But then, nobody involved actually does seem to have had more than the most basic understanding of the comic they were adapting, what it is about, and how it speaks about the things it is about. Hint: it’s not shit that can be set to crap rock riffs. And while Andrew Crosby’s (or whoever actually “wrote” this stuff without having their name in the dirt/credits) script runs roughshod over the storyline it is supposedly adapating, it still manages to introduce characters a movie audience won’t know about as entities Hellboy knows well, adding practically absurd amounts of expository dialogue that explains very little of help as well as a handful of badly placed flashbacks. I really don’t want to know what anyone who hasn’t read the comics makes of Baba Yaga, for example.

Speaking of flashbacks, particularly ill-advised is the one concerning Hellboy’s appearance on Earth because it is very much reshooting the start of Del Toro’s Hellboy as if to really show off everything that’s wrong with Neil Marshall’s version here - namely, the acting, the laughable writing, and production design that neither hits the unified aesthetics of the Del Toro version, nor that of the comics, nor one of its very one. For one of the worst things about this film full of bad things is how little the whole production cares about looking and feeling good or coherent, or building up a mood (any mood would do!). It’s random crap monster designs thrown against random, badly framed backdrops, edited without any feeling for style or finesse, action scenes that seem perfunctory to a degree that seems ridiculous in a Marshall film, and a desperate attempt at hawking a godawful “Songs from the Motion Picture” mp3 packet by drowning everything in perfectly shitty guitar riffs. You’d think this was some sort of parody, but really, it’s a movie made by people who can’t understand the difference between the Weird and the inanely goofy, and who sure as hell have neither much knowledge of nor respect for the comics they are adapting.


I could probably berate the actors too (shouldn’t Milla Jovovich after decades of acting by now know that part of that whole acting thing is moving one’s face to express human emotions, and should Ian McShane not spend more on-screen time on the telephone, seeing as he’s phoning in his performance anyway?), but really, this thing has already wasted enough of everyone’s time.

In short: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016)

Our long nightmare is finally over! Well, if you ignore the actual ending of the film that leaves the castle gates wide open for Greeks bringing gifts, direct-to-video sequels, TV shows, or whatever else you can dream up in your nightmares.

Unlike quite a few people, I don’t have any problem with the low-brow nature of the Resident Evil films, their inherent stupidity and their frivolous dumbness. In fact, I remember actually enjoying one of the franchise entries – I believe it was the third one but am much too lazy to look it up and am certainly not going to work through the other films again to find out – and having a bit of fun laughing at some of the others. This purportedly final film however mostly frustrates me. There is so much wasted potential for a fun hundred minutes of post-apocalyptic SF horror action shenanigans, so many ideas that should by all rights be awesome in their own silly ways but never work out being even the tiniest bit entertaining. The problem dragging it all down is franchise director/writer/producer Paul W.S. Anderson when he’s wearing his director’s hat. Despite his bad reputation, I think Anderson started out bright-eyed, talented, and imbued with a lot of love for genre films, making crap movies and some that were nearly very good. Alas, he has become a worse director with every Resident Evil chapter he has inflicted upon us.

This one, he absolutely ruins by overloading nearly every action scene (the final twenty minutes are a bit better, inexplicably) with so many edits, and so many camera positions and shots that for half of the time, you don’t really know what he’s actually trying to show you. To make bad matters worse still, the action in general feels as if it was filmed by an epileptic cameraman while in the throes of an attack. Calling the camera work during the action sequences jittery makes it sound much too calm. If you’re like me and not prone to headaches, you might experience a curious effect – I certainly did – for the camera is so jittery, the editing so fast and random, that there’s really no difference between any of the action scenes at all. Milla Jovovich being chased by zombie horde, Milla Jovovich wrestling with some big grey zombie dude, Milla Jovovich being chased by mutated dogs – it all feels the same, the sort of detail that makes action interesting and exciting to look at is completely lost in Anderson’s fits, until most of the film ends up as a random assortment of flashes and noises up there on the screen, displaying no attempt to connect with the people watching it even on the most basic level. Now that I think about it, it’s a bit of an avantgarde film in that approach.
Too bad it is also an utter failure as the kind of film it is actually supposed to be.

In short: The Fifth Element (1997)

Original title: Le cinquième élément

It’s easy and often enjoyable to make fun of Luc Besson and his obsession with films not making any logical sense whatsoever, his loathing for the laws of physics even when a scene has no need to ignore them, and his painful, weaponized idea of humour. However, when the man is on as a director, he is on, while still keeping all of these weaknesses alive.

The Fifth Element might very well be Besson’s magnum opus (though I’m more partial to his Jacques Tardi adaptation about the adventure of Adèle Blanc-Sec because there, Besson seems to have had more control over his most grating obsessions, though this one is certainly the more pure dose of Besson), a film that adds the love for French science fiction comics and Bruce Willis to a mix I find at once exhilarating and incredibly annoying. It certainly isn’t a film to watch when you have a migraine, for most of its running time consists of Besson using all his considerable visual powers and a very French concept of weirdness to screech nonsense into your ears while throwing the most incredible candy coloured lysergic images at your eyes. At its best, this means the film very authentically portrays a preposterous yet utterly beautiful looking future where clearly everybody has been driven completely insane by their surroundings; at its worst, this means Chris Tucker playing a guy named Ruby Rhod making high pitched noises forever.

Parts of Besson’s decisions are as bizarre as ever. Let’s just look at the cast: Bruce Willis as air taxi driver and space marine certainly makes sense (particularly since the guy never had much of problem making light of his own hard ass image), but why cast Milla Jovovich who can’t act her way out of a paper bag instead of a just as attractive actress who can (wait for it) act? Is the short guffaw of seeing Tiny Lister as The President (we are never quite sure of what exactly) really worth the fact that he’s going to be pretty bad in what is a considerably larger role than a cameo? Why Chris Tucker? No, seriously, why Chris Tucker of all the unfunny professional funnymen on Earth? And what’s up with Gary Oldman’s accent?

And on it goes with one bizarre decision after the next. The funny thing is, at least every second time I watch The Fifth Element I’m having a wonderful time with it, falling into its mix of beauty and nonsense like into…well, whatever piece of furniture is very loud and annoying yet awesome. It’s certainly not a film for every opportunity (but which one is?) - it is much too idiosyncratic, annoying and strange for that, but when the opportunity for it arises, it is glorious.

In short: Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)

Remember Alice (Milla Jovovich), superpowered action heroine who lost her superpowers without, you know, the film she was in actually letting her fall back under the cruel rule of gravity? The film at hand will continue to have Alice act as if she still had superpowers even though it's a plot point for the film's stupid, stupid ending that she hasn't.

Anyway, our heroine is in the hands of the evil Umbrella Corporation again and has to escape some ridiculous underground zombie outbreak simulation facility below Siberian ice. Oh, look, she's picking up a little girl, because you can't make a female-led action movie without a girl for the heroine to protect, otherwise the male audience would run away in fear, or something.

Various other favourite characters from the videogames pop up without bothering to provide any character beyond a check mark next to their names: Li Bing-bing as the only actual actress in the movie is wasted on Ada Wong, the horrible Sienna Guillory does a horrible Jill "Mind-controlled" Valentine, Leon Kennedy and Barry Burton make an appearance, and Boris Kodjoe reappears as last movie's Luther West, without any of them making any impression.

The film also finally realizes the awesome possibilities the cloning parts of its background provide and makes some of the bad guys clones of dead characters from earlier movies; which, alas, means the return of Michelle "One-note" Rodriguez, but hey, it's not as if the film then does anything of note with her or any of the other returnees. Part of the problem is that director/writer Paul W.S. Anderson really seems to think in the audience will not only remember the "mythology" of the previous films but also care about it, and so stages every stupid nothing as if it were of wide interest and deep import when all anyone will actually remember of previous movies will be zombies, explosions, shooting, slow motion, and the immortality of Wesker.

Like the last two or three Resident Evil games, Retribution has also long since given up on pretending to have anything at all to do with horror. Zombies really only make some small guest appearances, for this is not a crappy horror movie but a crappy action movie, so there are gun battles in slow motion, people walking in slow motion, slow motion monsters, slow motion explosions, and slow motion fights as if Anderson had been cursed by the ghost of the first Matrix movie. I haven't measured it exactly - for that would have meant going through this thing a second time - but I'm quite sure there are more slow motion scenes than scenes filmed at normal speed; if he could, Anderson would film the dialogue in slow motion too. I know it's not the done thing to criticize people's fetishes, but Anderson's slow motion fetish really goes too far. Especially since this overuse of slow-motion isn't just tacky and stupid (hey, it's a Resident Evil movie, so that's to be expected) but also drains any possible excitement out of the action, turning every fight into a matter of endurance for the ill-fated viewer.

On the positive side, at least Retribution (I have, by the way, no idea why it's called that way) isn't one of the action movies where you can't see anything that's happening for all of the fast editing; it's unfortunate that what the film shows in its action scenes isn't actually worth seeing.

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In short: Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

An army of Milla Jovovichs (realized surprisingly badly for a film made in 2010) attacks the headquarters of the Evil Umbrella Corp in Tokyo to finally take her (their) revenge on her arch enemy Wesker (Shawn Roberts). After laying waste to half of Tokyo, possibly killing Wesker in a plane crash and losing her superpowers (not that the film seems to want to remember that for much of its running time), the original Milla (or Alice, if you need character names in a film without characterization) tries to follow her companions from the last movie into a paradise known as Arcadia, supposedly located somewhere in Alaska. Upon arrival in the North, our heroine finds only a bunch of abandoned planes and helicopters, and her friend Claire Redfield (Ali Larter) who must have been lying on the ground, outside, in Alaska, in the snow, for a few months but is only suffering from PCA (short for plot-convenient amnesia).

Together they fight crime fly to an unnamed (I think; going by Resident Evil naming conventions it's probably called Squirrel) Big City, because that's the place where you want to be during the zombie apocalypse. The two women manage to hook up with another handful of survivors (Boris Kodjoe, Kim Coates and some other people sure to be eaten soon) who hide in a prison, and keep Claire's brother Chris (Wentworth Miller) prisoner there for reasons that will never make much sense (what a surprise), staring longingly at a ship anchored outside the city. A ship named Arcadia. Obviously, the zombies and their friends will soon get into the prison, but Chris knows a way out.

As someone who more than just sort of digs survival horror games as one of the few console-centric videogame genres close to his PC gamer heart, I do of course have my experiences with the Resident Evil games, which are the most low-brow and (alas) most successful series of their genre. I'm not madly in love with the series (that's what Silent Hill and Fatal Frame/Project Zero are for, after all), but I do respect its peculiar mixture of baroquely ridiculous and stupid plots and senseless violence. Although every new iteration of the series' movie adaptations has less to do with the games it is supposedly based on, their "writer" and (sometimes) director Paul W.S. Anderson uses all his powers of stupidity to keep his work as much in the dumb but bizarre spirit of the games as a Brit adapting a Japanese source can.

Still, stupidity and all, the first three Resident Evils didn't manage to charm me. There was always something artificial about their dumbness that managed to keep the films less fun than they should have been. This tragic state of affairs ends with this fourth film. Finally, the dumbness (as demonstrated by the idiotic plot - if you want to call it that, the non-characters non-acted by people who could act a little if they wanted to, the unbelievably absurd dialogue, and the mind-blowingly stupid use of slow motion and freeze effects as if The Matrix had never gone out of style) reaches critical mass and transforms what could be just another crap film by Anderson (whose Event Horizon I'll always cherish as actually nearly very good) into a movie so enthusiastically bad yet aiming to please that only those most soulless of creatures known as mainstream film critics could not appreciate its spirit of fun.

Needless to say, I sort of love it.

 

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