Love them or hate them, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil movies exist. Though I admittedly dug the first and fourth installments, as a fan of the games, I didn’t care for the live action film franchise by and large. The CGI flicks produced by Capcom, however, are the cat’s pajamas in my book.
Naturally, if anybody is going to disagree with my viewpoint, it’s going to be actress Milla Jovovich because she was the central character in all six of the films to be written and/or directed by Anderson – who just so happens to be her husband.
While promoting her most recent project, the widely panned Hellboy, Jovovich fearlessly shrugged off anything negative said about that and her prior work with the following statement:
“All I’m going to bed is this: all my raddest films have been slammed by critics,” Jovovich says. “It’s f**cking hilarious. Dazed and Confused? Seriously? Classic movie. The Fifth Element! You would have thought that was the worst movie ever made if you read the reviews in like ’98. Zoolander? Slammed. Joan of Arc? Disaster. Resident Evil? Let’s not even go there.”
While I’ll certainly give her The Fifth Element and a couple Resident Evil pictures as mentioned earlier, I can’t help continuing pointing out how the latter betrayed its source material at every turn. If it weren’t bad enough that the studio took a series of horror video games and translated them into action movies, characters adapted from those very games often took a back seat to Jovovich’s Alice and were often little more than cosplayers written nothing like how they were supposed to be. And don’t get me started on the faulty science or overarching narrative that completely sh@t the bed during The Final Chapter. Really, you’d think Anderson completely forgot what went down in the previous five movies.
Now, I’m sure some of you will disagree with me by saying that one or more of the Resident Evil films were awesome – and I’m fine with that. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, after all. Still, I’m hoping that the big screen reboot and gestating Netflix series will give me what I’ve been waiting to see since first becoming a fan of the gaming franchise in 1998.
