Resident Evil: Damnation ★★★★☆
No one can do anything without the backup of the American government.
Perhaps the apex of Resident Evil’s post-9/11 degeneration into bizarre, international, political conspiracy, featuring a confused Ukraine standin called the Eastern Slav Republic, a former Soviet state that seems to be simultaneously an unrecognised polity that is not not a member of the UN, struggling for independence from… presumably Russia?, but also has a US embassy and it’s own army separate from Russian forces. Within the Eastern Slav Republic’s border there is also a very ill-defined armed rebellion against “the oligarchs” fighting for independence from the republic itself, which has started using bioweapons in its fight against the state.
The confusion about what exactly is going on in this country may be because most of the film follows the perspective of Leon Scott Kennedy, an American anti-bioterrorism agent sent into the state to investigate whose understanding of the delicate political situation he finds himself in is such that he doesn’t know who the president of the ESR is. At the start of the film Leon is told that the US has cut diplomatic ties with the ESR and that he is meant to evacuate along with all of the embassy staff. Leon, being a cool guy who isn’t afraid to commit a few war crimes in order to do the right thing, decides to ignore his orders and fight a one-man anti-bioweapon war.
But the heart of the film is J.D., a rebel whose entire personality is that loves American action movies and wants to hang with his bros. He has fifty DVDs and none of them are pirated. He rules. He’s a complete dumbass and every time he is on screen he is doing something funny. I am obsessed with the little nod he gives Leon when he thinks that he’s outsmarted him and the the condescending little nod that Leon gives back. The emotional climax of the film is J.D. crying tears of blood as he dies to the bioweapon parasite that he helped unleash with the rebellion, confessing that he never cared at all about politics and just wanted to have fun with his mates.
The film continues on for a while after this with lots of action scenes of varying levels of quality and misogyny until at the climax everything that Leon and the rebels fought for in the end is rendered entirely pointless because the US and Russian military launch a joint invasion of the ERS and easily walk over all resistance, having already learnt that the ESR’s president was the one developing bioweapons and handing them over to the rebels as part of a plot to wipe them out and gain legitimacy. Leon gives a speech to a suicidal man about how once you’re a soldier you have a duty to live for the people who died alongside you and then shoots him in the spine.
J.D. is so right action movies rock.
