T5W#580-Top 5 Worst Resident Evil Movies

Well I’ll be damned.  Despite my continued skepticism, Zack Cregger’s Resident Evil reboot made a splash at the box office this past weekend and scored the highest ratings of any Resident Evil film released to date.  I guess I’ll have to get around to seeing if this movie is worth the praise and money’s it’s netted at some point but clearly, it’s not nearly as bad as some of the many stinkers in the various Resident Evil film series.  Be they canonically animated or live action, the Resident Evil franchise may be the highest grossing Video Game Adapted series on record but they can hardly be called masterworks and even the best can only be passable.  Anyway, a few years back in preparation for my playthrough of Resident Evil 4 Remake, I did a Top 5 on the Best Resident Evil Movies and initially had this ready as a follow up, only for it to fall by the wayside into stand by mode.  Well, stand by mode disengaged as we look at the Top 5 Worst Resident Evil Movies on today’s Top 5 Wednesday.

 
#5-Resident Evil: Death Island

Talk about a monumental disappointment.  Death Island promises us an epic team up between 5 RE legends and a chance to see how Jill Valentine is handling her life post Resident Evil 5.  Instead we barely focus on Jill’s PTSD in favor of another Raccoon City survivor who wont stop monologuing while everyone is stuck in a jail cell for half the movie.  I think this also marks the first time Jill and Leon S. Kennedy have shared the screen together.  But again, the movie would rather deal less exciting matters.  Remember that shot of Jill, Leon, Chris, Claire and Rebecca all dodging that giant tentacle? That’s probably the best part of an otherwise generic RE outing that wastes all of its potential for no reason.

 
#4-Resident Evil: Degeneration

Resident Evil’s first foray into CG Anime, and a film that would be set between Resident Evil 4 and 5, promised Leon and Claire having to die hard their way through an airport overrun by infected dropped off in a spectacular plane crash.  That part of the movie has a couple of moments but the bulk of Degeneration is tired RE tropes including Raccoon City survivors out for revenge and another giant lab facility for the final battle.  The animation is also pretty stiff, especially when it comes to Leon.  Oh and Claire literally does one cool thing before being sidelined for the rest of the movie.  Seeing as how this is a canon story in the Video Game universe, Degeneration had a chance to show the world what the Live Action movies couldn’t: How to do an RE movie right…and it didn’t.
 

#3-Resident Evil: Afterlife

By this point in the Paul W.S. Anderson RE saga, we were so far away from the source material that the movie wasn’t even Resident Evil in name only.  Not only does the movie botch the setup promised at the end of Extinction in the first 10 minutes, but the rest of the movie feels so drab and dull.  The chance to see the Redfield Siblings in action together is an afterthought because neither of them are Alice and one of the greatest Video Game villains of all time, Albert Wesker, feels like a poser cosplaying as him while trying to recreate his fighting style from RE5.  Half of the movies in slow motion too, an apt metaphor for the pacing of this terrible sequel.
 

#2-Resident Evil: Retribution

To think, it only gets worse after Afterlife.  The big draw of Retribution is the return of familiar faces like Michelle Rodriguez, Oded Fair and Colin Salmon from previous films (albeit clones). But because none of them are Milla Jovovich’s Alice, they hardly get any decent attention besides stand around and look evil.  Retribution also continues the Live Action films tradition of bringing in popular game characters like Leon, Ada Wong and Barry Burton and theyre just window dressing and a far cry from the bad asses we have better adventures with on a video game console.  At least watching Michelle Rodriguez railroad through a bunch of characters I don’t care about is kind of fun.
 

#1-Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

You can tell just from the 5 year gap between Retribution and this “final” entry in the Anderson Universe that Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich both just wanted to be done with this series and move on to other projects.  So it’s no wonder that The Final Chapter doesn’t even try to do anything spectacular, special or new other than hey let Alice do everything while everyone else sucks and even that feels worn and tired by this point.  Even by so dumb it’s entertaining standards, The Final Chapter manages to be more boring and sleep inducing than any other entry in this series.  Luckily, apparently, the new 2026 film proves that with this rock bottom moment for the franchise (along with the actual Resident Evil 6 game), there was nowhere else to go but up.