Resident Evil: Death Island - Review

The gang’s all here for Resident Evil: Death Island, which puts the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance’s Chris Redfield (Kevin Dorman), Jill Valentine (Nicole Tompkins), and Rebecca Chambers (Erin Cahill) into the field alongside TerraSave's Claire Redfield (Stephanie Panisello) and faithful DSO agent Leon S. Kennedy (Matthew Mercer). Their mission? Try to contain a new kind of viral outbreak that operates with its own set of rules. It’s 2015, and we’re in San Francisco – in Capcom’s ever-expanding RE universe, Death Island takes place after Resident Evil: Vendetta but before Resident Evil 7: Biohazard – and this time around, a lunatic is out to murder millions with his bio-engineered, T-Virus-addled drones. The CG animation really levels up whenever an action sequence hits, and the creature effects are impressive. But when our heroes slow down, either to consider all of the violence they’ve experienced or just to listen to a madman expose his grand scheme, Death Island can’t find a pulse.

While Jill and Chris investigate a run of mysterious new infections in San Francisco – the victims bear marks of being injected, not bitten – Leon chases down a shady engineer named Dr. Antonio Taylor (Frank Todaro), who was abducted before he could sell his rogue biotech on the international black market. And when Claire is called in to assess the carcass of a dead orca in the bay, she marvels at the size of the bite which did it in.

These leads converge on Alcatraz with a certainty that betrays the film’s intentions. It wants all of its principals in the same room – or in this case, the same antique prison wing – because they’re on the hit list of the villainous, Russian roulette-obsessed Dylan Blake (Daman Mills), the survivor of a botched mission to extract key Umbrella Corporation personnel from Raccoon City. (There must be a law somewhere that every Resident Evil offshoot must also lead back to the Raccoon City Incident.) It’s not enough that his T-Virus experiments have produced bio-drones designed to infect whomever he chooses. Blake wants to taunt our heroes with the revelation of his scheme. And taunt he does, to tedious extremes. The animation in Death Island is not capable of accurately conveying human emotion, but if it were, all of the film’s heroes would be groaning and giving off major side eye at the torture of Dylan Blake’s incessant droning.

The origin of Blake’s revenge plot isn’t the only throwback here. Jill is still processing post-traumatic stress from the events of Resident Evil 5, but she’s determined to stay in the field, where she believes she can do the most good by protecting the innocent. Chris initially thinks she’s pushing too hard, though he comes around once things go south at Alcatraz, Blake gains the upper hand, and things look bleak for the team. “We’ve got Jill,” Chris and Leon agree. “There’s hope.”

It’s a nice moment of camaraderie between these legacy characters, but there’s no time for sentiment when a supervillain is unleashing diabolical creatures in your midst. Lots of zombie head shots ensue, and Jill scores a few acrobatic death blows to silence the human-hungry experiments Blake has bred in the tunnels beneath Alcatraz. And when she finally confronts him and his henchwoman Maria (Cristina Valenzuela) – she’s a throwback, too, itching to use her enhanced fighting skills against Leon after making it out of Vendetta alive – Blake has another repetitive lecture prepared that highlights his plan for a streak of global terror.

Blake’s speechifying is unwieldy, and a drag on the pace of Resident Evil: Death Island. But the action definitely has some zing. Death Island accesses the spirit of the franchise whenever its characters fight one on one: Maria “walks” on the side of a tractor trailer while attacking Leon’s moving motorcycle, and Jill’s takedown of a zombie inside an abandoned house captures the combatants from below as they twist through the air and crash into a glass dining table. Leon and Jill also team up to face down a throng of nasty petri dish bio goons, and once the entire crew has managed to battle their way to the big final challenge, Death Island employs some Marvel-style swirling camera work to capture all of them in simultaneous action. It’s incredibly convenient for big bad Dylan Blake to contain his adversaries in the subterranean levels of Alcatraz, where they have full access to an arsenal that includes heavy machine guns, anti-tank rockets, and even a plasma rifle. (Slow to charge, but a blast to fire, and it looks super cool.) But with the power-ups these weapons provide, and some computer hacking from Rebecca and Claire, Jill, Chris, and Leon play a new version of Blake’s favorite game. It’s still Russian roulette, but every barrel is loaded.