For “Resident Evil: Retribution,” the fifth time is not the charm. Wait, that cliché is supposed to apply to third movies. Well, the third time wasn’t the charm for this series either, but here we are anyway – five movies into a story that didn’t deserve one sequel, let alone four.

But, money makes the world go round and with the new jacked up prices for 3D, it’s almost guaranteed that these films are going to keep making bank.

How many “Saw” films were there? Seven? Yeah, I don’t see an end in sight to this franchise unless Milla Jovovich gets bored with the role.

It’s really the only thing Jovovich stars in anymore, aside from supporting roles in other terrible movies like the recent “The Three Musketeers” reboot. So do you think she’ll just give this up? Me neither.

Anyway, let’s dive into this “movie.” It sucks. I could just end my review right now, but there are so many bad things I want to talk about, ney, need to talk about. It’ll make me feel better to get them off my chest.

The film isn’t “The Devil Inside” or “Silent House” horrible, but it’s darn close. The plot is dumb and overly complicated for a series based on killing zombies. The pace is all over the place, with the action and slower scenes having seemingly been mixed together by throwing all the film against a wall and seeing what stuck. I’d really like to know how the editor of this movie has a job working on a big budget film, or any film for that matter.

This leads into one of the two worst things about “Resident Evil: Retribution.” Minor spoiler alert, but the time frame of the movie is supposed to encompass about two hours. There is a countdown clock that several of the characters check multiple times.

That’s all fine and dandy if you can pace the countdown well and make the audience really feel like there is a sense of urgency for the actions the characters go through. However, that’s not the case here.

I never felt like the main characters were ever in danger of not beating the clock, leaving the suspense to a minimum. Time would skip forward when the characters had a break from fighting hordes of undead, but it would also drag on forever when they were actually fighting.

When they have only 10 minutes left, I swear it took about 45 minutes to play out. I kept thinking to myself, “Shouldn’t the thing have gone off by now?” Instead, they still had time to run around, continue shooting at enemies and go look for a missing girl, all in the span of what was supposed to be 10 minutes.

Then, there was the dialogue and the acting, and wow, was it awful. And by awful, I mean truly awful. I’ve never seen such horribly written dialogue.

What makes it worse is how it was delivered. It’s riddled with slow, unnecessary, drawn-out pauses, and clichéd “Go get ‘em” statements.

It was a chore to sit through, and, eventually, I just started laughing out loud in the theater when another exchange between two characters took place. If I had taken a drink every time I heard some bad guy utter “Give up!” followed by a “No, we won’t give up!” response or something stupid like that, I’d have had a blood alcohol content of at least three times the legal limit.

I went into this movie with low expectations, but they weren’t low enough. Things were made even more disappointing seeing as how I actually kind of liked the previous Resident Evil film, “Resident Evil: Afterlife.” I thought maybe they’d actually gotten the series back on track.

Instead, they decided to go the other way and got rid of everything that worked well in the last movie. I can only imagine the conversation the producers and director had.

“Hey, remember how nice of a job we did moving the story along and using our supporting characters well in that last movie? Well, for this one, let’s instead dump those good actors, add a few new bad ones playing characters that the fans of the video game series will like and completely stall the plot so we can make more of these films.” “That is an awesome idea boss.”

Was there anything good in this movie? Well it’s always cool to see people killing zombies, and Jovovich is hot and half naked as usual, but otherwise not really. If you do decide to go see this, do yourself a favor and don’t waste the extra five bucks on the 3D version. Remember, you’re already wasting upwards of ten bucks just to see the thing in 2D.

1 out of 5 stars.