Netflix’s ‘Resident Evil’ Series Is Zombie Poop
For such a successful video game franchise (whose recent PlayStation/Xbox installment, 2021’s Village, was a blast), it’s been amazingly difficult to concoct a faithful screen adaptation of Resident Evil.
Whereas Milla Jovovich and Paul W.S. Anderson’s six-film series had its fair share of pulpy highlights, it was often related to its source material in name only, and both Netflix’s four-part animated affair Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness and last year’s theatrical reboot Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City failed to do the zombie-killing saga justice. Unwilling to quit while its behind, however, Capcom once again tries to breathe live-action life into its popular survival-horror property with the unimaginatively titled Resident Evil, a new Netflix show (July 14) set after the canonical events of the original games. Unfortunately, their efforts go for naught—save for a typically sturdy Lance Reddick turn, it’s the sort of half-baked thriller most fans will likely abandon mid-adventure.
Die-hards will at least appreciate the numerous game references strewn throughout Andrew Dabb’s Resident Evil, some of them more esoteric than others. Yet they’re not enough to compensate for a story that aims to head in a novel (and quasi-faithful) direction, only to stumble about in search of an exciting set piece, beguiling mystery or scary moment. Frustratingly split between two time frames for reasons that never quite make sense—since this structure exacerbates the helter-skelter tone without enhancing suspense or intrigue—the action opens in gone-to-seed 2036 London, with Jade (Ella Balinska) using rabbits to conduct in-the-field tests on the city’s countless zombies, which are referred to as Zeroes for reasons too lame to explicate. It’s a post-apocalyptic urban wasteland populated almost exclusively by the undead and giant mutant monsters such as the titanic caterpillar that nearly takes Jade’s life, and it—and this entire scenario—feels about as generic as they come, a dull rehash of 28 Days Later meets The Last of Us meets The Walking Dead meets All of Us Are Dead meets [insert any zombie fiction from the past twenty years].