Seven months ago, I reviewed what I thought at the time was the single worst Resident Evil property that has ever been made – and yes, I’m including the six awful Resident Evil films made by the husband-and-wife team of Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich.
Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City was a CW-level production – even starring Neal McDonough to boot – that somehow managed to lower the franchise’s live-action bar, despite it having already been dug deep under the ground over the last 20 years.
I thought that Kaya Scodelario’s portrayal of Claire Redfield, rebranded as your typical Hollywood ‘strong female lead who will carry the future of a franchise’, was an embarrassment.
Worse than that was Avan Jogia’s portrayal of Leon S. Kennedy, one of the top two most beloved characters in the entire franchise, who played the Raccoon City Police Department’s newest member as an incompetent and bumbling buffoon.
At the time, I thought that was the lowest point that the Resident Evil franchise could go – the operative words there being ‘I thought’.
The film was so bad that I thought Netflix had to have produced it, despite it actually being brought to screen by Sony Pictures.
Not only that, but it made me forget that the streaming service was actually coming out with their very own Resident Evil production, this time attempting an episodic television series rather than a film.
Like a traumatic childhood experience, I had suppressed all images of Netflix’s Resident Evil out of my memory – that was, until last weekend, when Netflix released their series for the entire world to see, and more than anything, what caught my attention were the reactions of utter disgust and embarrassment from long-time fans of Capcom’s iconic video game series.
The fan reception to clips and screenshots of this show was so scathing that it made me do something that I never do: sit down and watch a Netflix series.
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“Was the show as awful as everyone on the internet said that it was?” I asked myself. Sadly, the only way to find out was sit-down and watch the first episode.
If I may give the show glowing praise, the first 10 minutes of the first episode is pretty solid and stands as just about the only thing here that makes you feel like you’re watching something related to Resident Evil.
However, ladies and gentlemen, the praise ends there.
Whatever you’ve heard about the show on Twitter in no way prepares you for this monstrosity, as, make no mistake, this is a Resident Evil show in name only.
Rather, this is a Gossip Girl series disguised as a Resident Evil adaptation.
Let’s start by talking about the elephant in the room, notorious Resident Evil villain Albert Wesker, who in Netflix’s series is played by Lance Reddick.
That’s right – the guy who fought Chris Redfield in a freaking volcano is played by Cedric from The Wire.
Resident Evil’s notorious villain is played by Lance Reddick. The guy who fought Chris Redfield in a freaking volcano is played by Cedric from The Wire.
Now don’t get me wrong Reddick is an amazing actor, but he is horribly miscast in this role.
I’ve heard rumor that not only did Reddick really want the role, but that the showrunners just couldn’t bring themselves to tell him ‘No’.
If true, anyone who refused to push back against the actor’s wishes should be fired, as he is not Wesker.
I mean, just look at his attempt at recreating Wesker’s iconic look: he looks more like a man who is 30-years too old to be cosplaying Blade than a villainous mad man.
Believe it or not, he is not the worst part of this disaster.
The show’s focus is on Albert Wesker and his two sassy teenage daughters, and not even 15 minutes in, audiences are treated to a sassy black teenager spouting the same racial commentary someone with ‘BLM’, ‘ACAB’, and their number of Pfizer shots in their Twitter profile would.
As someone who has a very short leash when it comes to woke dialogue in television shows, watching the entire fire episode of this god-forsaken mess was a true test of my patience.
Jade Wesker, who is played by Ella Balinska (Charlie’s Angels (2019)) in the present day and Tamara Smart (Artemis Fowl) during her flashbacks, may go down as one of the most unlikable protagonists in the history of television.
Not only does she have a horrible personality, but everything that comes out of her mouth makes you audibly groan. If she’s not talking about watching Zootopia porn, she’s cursing out her own father, who subsequently just sits there and takes it.
Again, this is who the showrunners decided would be the perfect character to base the entire series on.
Started watching that resident evil netflix show and im having second thoughts pic.twitter.com/5rJSbEKQow
— Ara (@arastrife) July 14, 2022
It was at this point, somewhere within the first 14-minutes of this episode, that I went to IMDb to answer the question, as the great Stone Cold Steve Austin, once asked, “Who the f–k wrote this b—h?”
If you’re looking for someone to blame for the series’ abysmal dialogue, look no further than showrunner Andrew Dabb and the show’s executive story editor Lindsey Villarreal.
Dabb is known for writing multiple episodes of the TV show Supernatural, while recent episodes of The Walking Dead stand as Villarreal’s most prominent credits – two respective resumes that indicate their specialty in writing shows that have worn out their welcomes.
However, if the target audience for Resident Evil is narcissistic teenagers who love watching poorly written but popular television dramas, then Netflix hired the two best people for the job.
One look at their hiring tells the entire story of how we got this epic stinker in the first place – or as the great comedian Ron White once said, “It’s not racism, it’s profiling.”
Now, while we can sit here and complain about diversity and inclusion all day, let’s be honest, the fact that this series was developed by Netflix already indicated that checking these boxes would come before providing a quality series.
And that sacrifice is readily apparent in Resident Evil, as the show has more structural problems than I can count, including one of the most iconic villains in video game history being race-swapped and turned into a bumbling simp, Everything centering around his teenage daughters – who are about as likeable as a tax audit from the IRS – and a storytelling-dialogue combo that makes shows such as Euphoria look like The Sopranos by comparison.
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But hey, lets’ take a minute to give credit where credit is due and give the shill media a round of applause, as while everyone with two-eyes and functioning ears was intent on burying and ignoring the series, some outlets did their best to try and drag its corpse across the finish line.
Gamespot asserted, “Netflix’s Resident Evil isn’t just the best adaptation of the zombie franchise yet. It earns the title of one of the few ‘good’ video game adaptations bestowed on the world,” while Decider lauded it as “one of the most addicting, thrilling, and delightfully unpredictable shows of 2022.”
Not to be left out, IGN declared that the series was “the best adaptation of the games yet,” making it apparent that if Netflix ever bombed a Ukrainian supermarket, they’d be one of the first outlets to tell you that the dead children actually tripped and fell.
Of course, as if on cue, the media has already come out to label people who didn’t like the series as racist, even claiming that the show was the victim of “review bombing” – a phrase that the media trots out to dismiss any negative reaction to TV shows and movies that push agendas that they support.
If the media tried to gaslight you any harder, Blue Rhino would send them a cease and desist.
Now, some people may argue that the series gets better as it goes on and that I have to watch more to get to the good stuff. Well, as Eric July once said, these people do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
From just this first episode alone, it’s clear that Netflix’s Resident Evil is another woke reboot trying to capitalize on an already existing fanbase by telling them what they like it instead of giving them what they want.
I honestly feel bad for hardcore Resident Evil fans out there, because on the scale of how “down bad” they are, they could be considered the Khloe Kardashian of the pop-culture universe.
Your video games are going to crap, Capcom and Sony can’t even combine to give you one decent movie out of seven, and now they expect you to accept this absolute abomination as a canon entry to the series.
Ultimately, while Roe vs Wade may have been repealed, the fact is there’s nothing that can save this abortion.