The Resident Evil movies will leave Netflix on July 31st. Netflix only had the first and fifth outings in the widely despised video game movie franchise. If you’ve never seen any of the six Resident Evil movies, you may have heard many bad things about them. They deserve their terrible reputation, but that doesn’t make them any less funny. I strongly recommend sitting down with some friends to point and laugh at the 22-year-old franchise. Just get there quick, because Netflix will cure the virus in a day or two.
Netflix Puts Resident Evil Back Underground This Month
The longtime film critics and comedians behind Red Letter Media summed up the Resident Evil film franchise very well 12 years ago. While watching the scene in which Milla Jovovich’s Alice kicks a zombie dog out of the air, Jay, Mike, and Rich collapse into feverish laughter. To quote Jay Bauman, “This is borderline experimental.” The Resident Evil movies are universally terrible. They capture none of the positive qualities of the long-running game franchise, but they do share a few flaws. The movies wisely dispense with the games’ convoluted plot, but they swiftly sub in their own. A lively, B-movie charm kept the games interesting, but it turned the movies into pretenders to an unimpressive throne. The action might be the only upside, because it often devolves into hilarious garbage. Resident Evil delivers laughable dialogue, a goofy story, and slapstick action sequences. Its comedy is barely unintentional.
I think watching Resident Evil on Netflix will feel like opening a time capsule. Video game movies have a long, bad history. People started bandying around the term “video game movie curse” in the 2000s. I’ve always bristled against the phrase, mainly because there are several good films in the genre. Live-action video game movies tend to fail, but animated entries have broken the “curse” several times. Today, negative expectations are less common. Standout examples like Sonic, Detective Pikachu, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie encourage viewers to expect better things. Video game TV shows like Castlevania, Fallout, and The Last of Us stand head and shoulders above their big-screen counterparts. Resident Evil is a glimpse of an earlier time, but it’s also a great way to examine the genre’s failures. If nothing else, they encourage gratitude for what we have now.
There are six Resident Evil movies. Each one earned an impressive box-office take and a critical lashing. Audiences seemingly didn’t care, as each entry made more than the last. There’s no good explanation for their success. The magic has worn off by now. Director Paul W. S. Anderson and star Milla Jovovich put out another video game movie in 2020’s Monster Hunter, but that project flopped hard. The Resident Evil era is over, but you can still take a look back before the films leave Netflix on July 31st.
