My best friend stopped by and brought a copy of Resident Evil: Vendetta to my place, so we watched it. This is the third Resident Evil CG movie. The movie stars Leon S. Kennedy, Chris Redfield and Rebecca Chambers. This movie doesn't have any connection to the live-action RE movies starring Milla Jovovich.
RE: Vendetta takes place after the events of Resident Evil 6 and before Resident Evil 7. This movie is canonical to the games and previous CG movies (RE:Degeneration, RE:Damnation) but nothing really connects this movie to the video games when it comes to story so it's OK to watch this without playing and watching the games and older CG movies.
The theme of this movie is family and revenge. The first scene shows Leon walking into the morgue to inspect some dead bodies, then a zombie woke up inside a body bag that forces Leon to shoot the zombie down. Next scene shows Chris and some military grunts having a mission to rescue the undercover informant, Cathy White and her son, Zack from a RE traditional derelict mansion and take out Glenn Arias, a weapons dealer. The mission went bad leaving Chris the only survivor. He then encounters Arias. The two have a CQC fight, Arias have the upper hand disarming Chris and shot him at the back (Chris got metal-plated protective vest). After their fight, Arias showed Chris the now infected Cathy and explained his new A-Virus that let's him control the infected then walks away along with his cohorts (one of them looks like a rip-off of Bane from DC comics). The mission is a failure and the backup chopper gunned down the rest of the infected including Cathy White to protect Chris.
It's a pretty basic and very weak revenge story because lots of movies have done this. There are some unexplained things and a huge plot hole in the story too. Nothing's really interesting about this movie except for the amazing action scenes and pretty CG graphics. What caught my interest is that this movie have Rebecca Chambers. This is her latest canonical appearance in the Resident Evil series since RE0. While it's cool to have her back and she's working together with Chris and Leon, Rebecca didn't have any cool action scenes and she's fallen into the damsel in distress type character, but she's the key to figuring how the new virus works and learn about its vaccine. This is probably the weakest Resident Evil story, in my opinion. By the way, the antagonists of this movie are weak too.
While the story is bad, if you have your friends to watch with you, it's fun to nitpick and laugh at the movie's flaws like the stupidity of some characters and some awkward/funny scenes, like Chris having a powerful CQC slap to the face and the scene where Leon and Chris interrogates some guy. Can you imagine two rugged big boys is bullying the little scrawny guy.
The movie shines with its action scenes though which is over-the-top in some scenes. It's awesome to see Leon and Chris shooting and beating down lots of aggressive zombies point blank and at a distance with precision, agility and dexterity and most of these zombie fights happened in cramped areas like hallways. This prove that these two are veterans when it comes to bio-organic weapons. The motion captured CQC fight is fast and amazing too.
Leon and Chris' voice actors reprises their roles which is good, making it consistent to the games and movies. The overall voice acting is pretty good. The music that sticks to me is the introduction music that sounds similar to Men in Black theme, which is pretty funny.
Resident Evil: Vendetta is the weakest RE title and the sad part is that it's canon. The good parts of this movie are the action scenes, the selection of protagonists, especially Rebecca Chambers, the awesome graphics and the choreographed fight scenes. I recommend that you watch this movie with friends that are fellow fans (not ultimate fanboys) of the series. I'll add this one too, I think they're introducing the potential future protagonist(s) here and this movie is a sequel bait.
Cheers!
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