Resident Evil: Degeneration

It’s been seven years since the disaster in Raccoon City.  A peaceful day at Harvardville Airport is shattered when a plane crashes into the terminal, unleashing a horde of mutated undead upon the populace.  Through a twist of fate, Racoon City survivors Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield reunite to combat this very familiar threat but learn that this is only the beginning.  A rogue scientist is out for revenge, seeking to unveil the truth behind Raccoon City and will stop at nothing to see his mission completed…even if it means repeating history to do so.

Resident Evil and Anime have a ton in common when it comes to their visual styles and presentations.  The fact that it took so long for an Anime adaptation to arrive is beyond me, heck Degeneration came out in 2008, six years after the franchise’s silver screen debut in 2002 with Paul W.S. Anderson’s passable Resident Evil.  Still, for those who wished a Resident Evil movie would focus more on the characters they love rather than the Alice they don’t, prayers have been answered…sort of…not really.  While this is a movie set in the RE continuity, serving as an interquel between Resident Evil 4 & 5, Degeneration does very little to justify being more than a 90min cutscene with lots of familiar RE tropes and characters who fans probably wont be begging to see again in later entries (games or films). 
 
Any kind of good in this film comes from it’s first half hour.  An airport outbreak is a fun scenario to play on and it really could have taken up the entirety of the film.  The actual crash that kicks off the event is pretty impressive and epic as well.  Much of the action that follows, involving Leon and two members of a Special Response Team, also offers that classic RE dread of moving through dark hallways with minimal ammo and with no idea what lies around any corner.  You feel right at home for a little bit in this segment.  And it helps that Paul Mercer and Alyson Court return to voice Leon and Claire after portraying them in Resident Evil 4 & 2.  Plus, Salli Saffioti pops up in a cameo reprising Leon’s cute handler Ingrid Hunnigan from RE4.  
 
Once the story moves out of the airport, however, Degeneration grinds to a halt before jumping back into very familiar RE territory.  There’s a lot of world building exposition that doesn’t really go anywhere in the grand scheme of the story (or just not enough to really care about it).  It’s all also being delivered either by a supporting cast that is hardly memorable or Leon, who despite Mercer’s voice being welcome, sounds like he’s more The Terminator than the wisecracking Secret Agent we’ve come to love.  The movie just gets boring for the second third before the final third transitions to a setting we’ve seen a million times in Resident Evil games already.  You have a terrorist who soups himself up with a virus that turns him into a mutated behemoth and he runs amok in a giant lab/centralized room while Leon tries to evade him…kind of standard stuff for RE really.  It’s more tedious than exciting, making the viewer believe this film should be much shorter than it is.
 
And what about the CG animation?  It’s ok when the action is happening and the characters are kicking ass.  It’s when the action isn’t happening that the real problems arise.  When not ducking and weaving around Zombies or Bio Weapons, everyone just feels stiff and lacking in most kind of human expressions.  Leon is top culprit here.  My comparing him to Arnold Scwarzzeneger’s Terminator isn’t far off.  He just stands still and barely makes any kind of facial expression beyond the super serious and tense one he’s sporting in his first appearance.  Also, he lacks the one liners that made his RE4 story so iconic.  Claire arguably gets worse treatment.  She is far prettier and more expressive but she’s hardly in Degeneration long enough to make any kind of real impact.  This is a Leon heavy actioner at its core as Claire only has one really awesome moment of bad assery to show off in the entire movie before being relegated to a bystander role for the rest of the runtime.  Surprisingly, the lifeless Zombies are more intimidating and convincing looking than the very stiff human characters, go figure.  If nothing else, the few flashback scenes of Leon and Claires time in Raccoon City make me wish we were watching a CG Anime adaptation of Resident Evil 2 instead.
 
Resident Evil: Degeneration has a good setup with the airport but once that’s done, it quickly becomes a boring and unimpressive experience that’s just as lifeless as the reanimated bodies of the undead.  The big reunion between Leon and Claire feels forced as Claire has little to do after the airport and Leon is so emotionless he’s hardly like the guy we’ve come to admire in the games.  Add in several RE tropes that are very been there/done that and you’ve got a film that, while cannon in the RE universe, is a chapter that didn’t need to be told.  I hate to say it but how come the Paul W.S. Anderson movie felt more like a unique Resident Evil experience than a debut Anime film for the franchise…now that’s a scary thought.
 
2/10
 

Next time, we take a look at Degeneration’s sequel and hope that it’s better than this disappointing snooze fest I just watched.  I hope so but also suggest caution.  Cause the last time RE tried taking things to a global stage, we got Resident Evil 6.  To celebrate the release of Resident Evil 4 Remake, it’s Resident Evil: Damnation, This Friday right here at the Gundam Anime Corner.