There was a brief moment — right around the release of “Resident Evil: Retribution,” and the discourse about “vulgar auteurism” that peaked along with it — when it seemed as though Paul W.S. Anderson had found a way to weaponize the nü-metal nothingness of his blockbuster slop into a strange kind of somethingness that nobody else could make. If the first three movies in the survival-horror franchise had systematically drained Capcom’s source material of everything that made the “Resident Evil” video games scary, fun, or at all interesting for any other reason, the fourth one made it seem as though Anderson had tunneled a hole straight through the bottom of the lowest common denominator until he burst through the top of a different artistic stratum altogether; one less concerned with plot or purpose than with the orgiastic fervor of creating recursive spectacle at the end of history.

The sequence where Anderson...