Resident Evil Death Island Review

The movie surpassed my super low expectations I had for it, the movie isn't geniunely good at all but it's not the garbage I was expecting it to be either. It's middle of the road and I am surprised it accomplished that much.

It establishes itself that it's a dumb action movie from the first 10 minutes with how Leon finds the truck holding a vital character minutes after being told about his relevance to the plot and getting into a dumb motorcycle chase and highway fist fight later, if you can't accept the first 10 minutes of the movie and then you might as well shut it off. I can go on about the dumb crap in the movie, and some of it that bugged me was how they established a virus that acts like FOXDIE from MGS and how it's basically kryptonite for RE characters, which is a funny way of creating stakes and tension for the movie since it needs to seperate the team and make sure Rebecca and Jill play their roles in the story somehow.

A big issue however is the that villain is basically Obito Uchiha garbage levels of writing where he wants to destroy the world because he was forced to kill his friend. Give me a fucking break, and so much of his character is expressed through endless amounts of excessive monologuing most of it is during the middle point of the movie. His backstory is just too much of a boring sob story to even make me care and his characterization being expressed through monologuing doesn't help.

Some nitpicks as a "fan" of the games is that it's rather silly to see characters struggle against typical zombies when they have beaten them over 9000 times by now and it's also rather amusing to see Lickers get killed by one shot to the head with no use of a shotgun or high powered weapons considering in REmake 2 they take over 3 shotgun rounds to kill and the REmake games were the ones being refrenced in earlier in the movie.

Good things about the movie is that Jill is handled decently and is the best character in the movie. Her character is decently foreshadowed as being the "underdog" lone wolf of the team is decently contextualized within the first 20 minutes. I also like some of the nods to the games like RE5 and 6 which kind of does a good job at creating some degree of a continuity in a franchise as messy as RE's. Rebecca's role I also kind of liked since it does a good at making her establish her role as the medic of the team and the action was decent and wasn't wannabe John Wick like Vendetta was.

The ending climax with the super sayian hulk wannabe boss fight was hilariously over the top. It's basically an over the top climax boss fight you'd find in an RE game particularly the third person over the shoulder games.

Overall, for an RE movie it wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be especially considering how much RE content has been produced as of late. Still, not "good" but at the very least tolerable.