1.5/10 If you read my “Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness” review a couple weeks ago you will see that I watched every awful “Resident Evil” movie in preparation for this reboot and how painful they were to get through. I thought in reviewing “Infinite Darkness” and this that there was nowhere for the franchise to go but up. Oh how wrong I was. You know this movie in an abomination (unintentional pun) when it makes me yearn to be watching the Paul W.S. Anderson garbage “Resident Evil” movies that started back in 2002 and ended in 2016 with “Resident Evil: The Final Chapter”. So why is this movie so bad? I’m glad you asked. What is unfortunate is that the best moments of the movie are all within the first 15 minutes. The movie kicks off with a promising start and you can tell that as opposed to previous RE movies that were more action oriented, this movie goes for more of the horror aspects, which align closer with the video games. However, after the first 15 minutes, the movie is just one downward spiral while you glare at your watch, hoping the harder you stare the quicker the time will pass so you can get the Hell out of the theater. The first stand out problem is the casting. When you are basing your movie off of a video game, it is pretty easy to look at the video game characters and try to model your actors and casting decisions based off of that. Instead we get some woke, diverse casting to ensure we, God forbid, don’t cast too many white people in the movie. Even the decent actors (of which there are only two or three in the entire movie) have such a poor script to work with that trying to pull a winning performance out of the script is a fool’s errand. So we start with bad casting, mediocre acting and as the movie runs along, you will grow to hate pretty much every character, hoping they die instead of rooting for them. At the end of each year I write my Top 10 Best/Worst Films of the Year list and then have a bunch of subcategories like Best Horror Film, Worst Comedy, etc. I include Best Character(s) and Worst Character(s) and while watching this, I could tell that the character of Leon Kennedy, played by Avan Jogia, would jump straight to the top of my list of Worst Character(s) of 2021. The fact that he is allowed to stay a cop, while having shot a partner, falling asleep on the job, having a lower IQ than the zombies he is fighting, etc. was just baffling. I don’t care how small the town is, there is no town that would trust this guy with a gun and a badge. Main and supporting characters are dumb, terrible at their job, annoying, inconsistent and just a chore to spend time with. Character development is non-existent. The overall story is generic and bland with the only decent moments coming via flashbacks. Surviving in a horror video game is fine but you need more of a…pun intended…fleshed out story to adapt a video game over to the film medium. You know this movie is horrendous when Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Releasing decided not to even market it because they knew they had a dud on their hands. But shame on them for greenlighting this script in the first place as they only have themselves to blame. This reminds me of when a studio has the rights to a property but they have to make a movie by a certain date or the property rights divert back to a different studio, so they just crap out anything to retain the rights. This is what that feels like. Even minor things that most people won’t notice stood out to be. We see multiple billboards throughout Raccoon City and every single one was a tourist advertisement for Raccoon City. It was like the AMC of cities. You see a movie at AMC and you get three separate commercials/advertisements for AMC, despite the fact that you’ve already spent your money to be there. Similarly, you are already in Raccoon City, so I’m not sure why literally every billboard needs to advertise where you already are. Are there no businesses in the city that would rather try to get their name out there? The horror isn’t scary, the action is underwhelming and several of the visual effects shots might as well be straight out of the video game. The only redeeming aspects I can think of are a couple of actors are trying their hardest (Hannah John-Kamen, Robbie Amell, Neal McDonough), the score has a few solid tracks that stood out and some of the creature effects looked good as the movie wisely embraced the strong bloody gore from the games. Overall though, the pacing is such a drag that this movie feels like an eternity and you will grow to hate the movie more and more the deeper you get into it. The entire “Resident Evil” film and TV franchise has yet to put out anything that could be deemed “decent”. Watching this movie will rot your brain more than if you were to get infected with the T-virus.
#ThreeBillboardsOutsideArklayCounty / #KillJill / #LeonTheUnprofessional / #WelcomeToCartoonShitty / #ClaireyMovie / #GameOverGMan!
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