Been too busy to watch anything serious, so I decided to finally give in and watch entries 4 & 5 of the Resident Evil series (Afterlife and Retribution. I'd only seen the first one and skipped 2 & 3. From what I gather it doesn't really matter what order you watch them in?)
Afterlife was nothing to write home about, had some decent action scenes and a few chuckles, but Retribution, oh man... Mad props to Anderson for fully and unapologetically leaning into the video game logic and mechanics of it all. Conceptually, yes, it's just a shoot-'em-up-and-escape-from-the-lair sort of thing, but in the process it manages to hit upon some unexpectedly deep existential (for the lack of a better word?) questions. And yes, some of the choreography, the best of which is shot against blaring white, empty corridors, is absolutely jaw-dropping. It's not without its faults (some of the firefights get boring) and could have benefited from more minimalist dialogue (the grunts who side up with Alice are pretty awful and one of them even looks like Elon Musk; I would have been happier with them as silent characters), but it's a breezy 85 minutes (the credit sequence is 9 minutes long!!) and perfect fodder for when you don't have the capacity to watch anything too cerebral.