Five films, over $660 million at the worldwide box office, you have to hand it to “Resident Evil.” In ten years, it has become, while few who enjoy good films have noticed, the most successful video game film franchise in history.

These movies have kept action-horror hack Paul W. S. Anderson in business and sustained model-turned-actress Milla Jovovich in between her other rare appearances on the big screen.

The movies? To a one, violent, nonsensical bloodbaths, bad on several levels. At least last time, they seemed to spend some money, expand their vision of the combat zone and that resulted in a bigger, more action-packed and by far more successful exercise in first-person shooter mayhem.

But from the digitally augmented action to the disconcertingly disembodied voices of the actors, “Resident Evil: Retribution” seems to remove whatever ambition they let themselves develop and take this dog-eared franchise back to square one.

Anderson returns to the director’s chair for the third time in the franchise, here. Which means he isn’t out re-butchering “The Three Musketeers,” so be grateful for that. He gives us a film with three different openings — a rewind-the-last-film prologue, with bio-altered “security expert” Alice (Jovovich) getting us up to date on the first four films

“At last,” she narrates, “we thought we had survived the horror.”

But no. An imaginary Alice as housewife-mom assaulted by zombies, then that inevitable moment when Alice wakes up, nearly naked, in a vast overlit room where The Umbrella Corp. has her stashed.

You will remember that Umbrella Corp. mades its billions off bio-weapons, and one virus busted out of Raccoon City and turned the Earth into Planet Zombie, with Alice the last semi-human hope of saving the last of humanity.

If you don’t remember that, you’ve probably been spending your time more wisely.

In “Retribution,” Alice is back in a super-secret Umbrella facility tasked with fighting her way out through various levels, “protocols,” basically gamescape levels that recreate a zombie apocalypse in New York, suburbia, Toyko and Moscow. Ada (Li Bingbing) is to be her helper. Valentine (Sienna Guillory) and Rain (big screen tough-girl Michelle Rodriguez) are trying to stop her.

And a SWAT team is working its way into the facility to help her out.

As a few of her other films attest, Jovovich can still act,  though you’d never know it from these bullets-and-bustiers pictures. She handles action choreography well, doesn’t ruin the few feeble one-liners Anderson writes for her and summons up a moment or two of lip-quivering fear in the film’s opening. But it’s a flat performance, a still-fit woman looking exhausted at playing shoot-em-up in a movie where empathy, plot and character development were the first things sacrificed in the budget.

Anderson stages some of the bloodier brawls in bright, white futuristic hallways of chrome and plastic — the blood shows up redder. He busies up the screen with computer graphics to show Alice being monitored as she makes her way out.

And he fills Alice’s field of fire with zombies, giants and alien-ish beasties for her to shoot, torch, decapitate or impale. The violence in “Retribution” is impersonal, gory and non-stop.

Which, due to the digital world of film these days, may be the fate of “Resident Evil” and Jovovich in it. It may never stop. They’ll keep doing more and more of her stunt work with computers, shaving years off her looks as she ages. Which may be the real “retribution” here. Another movie comes out, more bad reviews, as punishment they keep making more.

MPAA Rating:R for sequences of strong violence throughout

Cast: Milla Jovovich, Michele Rodriguez, Oded Fehr, Li Bingbing, Aryana Engineer

Credits: Written and directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, a Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:31