Reviewed by Alicia Glass
Studio: Capcom Company, Sony Pictures Entertainment
MPAA Rating: R
Director: Makoto Kamiya
Review Rating: 7
Set inside the Resident Evil world of the Umbrella Corp and mutating zombies, Leon Kennedy is sent to an eastern Slav republic Bio Organic Weapons are being tested and an outbreak is sure to follow!
It’s a little hard for me to get into these side films of the RE world, as much as I enjoy the movies with Milla Zovovich, never played the video games.Leon is an iconic character from the video games, he’s never been in any of the films to my knowledge. Ada Wong has, but we’ll get to her in just a second.
The show starts off with an intro about how war completely devastated this “eastern Slav country” and how their leaders, in particular President Svetlana Belikova, are desperate for a solution. Leon gets scooped unceremoniously scooped up while on vacation and deposited in the desolate war-torn country to deal with the latest bio threat. He soon enough gets attacked by Lickers, those fleshy things that look kind of like dogs turned inside out with brains where the eyes and all should be.
Surprisingly, the Lickers stop just short of killing him, and Leon harbors suspicions of his saviors Alex and J.D. somehow being able to control the mutant dogs. Iconic character Ada Wong meets with President Svetlana posing as a worker for the U.N., but really, she’s just here peddling BOWs (bio-organic weapons) that are supposedly completely controllable to the President. Who, sadly, foolishly, accepts it all. The Plagas, the ball of flesh linkages between human and mutant-zombie with purported control, are already being grown and experimented with, and what better place than a worn-torn country that the outside world wants nothing to do with? Meanwhile, Leon and J.D. and Alex are trying to hunt down the Lickers and Plagas and anything else nasty going on around this place. President Svetlana and Ada Wong have a nice little confrontation, and the ambitious Prez activates two Tyrants, mutant monsters that look like a Prometheus character tricked out in Repo! The Genetic Opera drag, to cover her escape. Leon and Alex have to deal with the Tyrants, no mean feat, while the city is literally falling down around their ears. A lot of the ending is implied rather than actually known, and it seems to me most of the Protags did actually escape.
It’s a perfectly fine for a stand-alone within the RE universe, though it felt a little rushed to me. The setting doesn’t actually need all this attention to storyline and reasoning, fans of the Resident Evil world are here generally for the monsters and the action sequences. There are several parts inside the show where I was hard-pressed to know that it was CGI too, the underground parking structure sequences especially, looked real enough to get Leon skewered in the dark!
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