It's Fine, But it Ain't Resident Evil

Rating: 6/10 (20 March 2018)

The film is alright, mostly. It's just, alright. The acting is hammy, the writing's mediocre, the soundtrack is generic, the visual look is basic and ugly, the story is generic and we've all seen it before. It lies between a rock and a hard place in the unfortunate spot of "okay." It's average. And that's fine, if you wanna watch an average action movie more power to you. But the main problem is, it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Resident Evil. The only thing that ties it to its source material is people throwing around the term "Umbrella Corporation." The Hive is made up. The Red Queen is made up. The main characters' team is made up. And hey, I mean, if you wanna maybe have your film pave its own path that's fine I guess, but the sequel for this film is very clearly supposed to be based on Resident Evil 2/3, so that excuse doesn't fly.
Even if they did try to make their own story they should have had it actually feel like something that would be in Resident Evil. As it stands, the adventures of Anderson's wife in The Hive feels like fan-fiction. Except calling it fanfiction is a stretch because I'm pretty sure Anderson probably never played any of the games, and just read the plot synopsis on Wikipedia. Of course at the very end, they tease with the phrase "Nemesis program" as both a fanbase ego-stroke and a sequel bait. The film is Uwe Boll-tier. In fact I think the only reason it performed better than Boll's Alone in the Dark adaptation is because Resident Evil is a Japanese series and most people over here that follow it probably know as little about it as Paul W.S. Anderson did.