Resident Evil: Vendetta (2017)

Resident Evil: Vendetta arrives as a brisk animated exercise in bioterror, motorcycles, and the enduring appeal of Chris Redfield punching a mutated arms dealer. The plot concerns a vengeful former CIA operative who turns viral agents into wedding arrangements, a premise that would be alarming if the film did not treat it as an excuse for hallway gunplay and a Tyrant in a glass penthouse. The tone is pure franchise maintenance. Fans of the games will recognize the pieces. Newcomers will recognize the noise.

On the social front, the film is almost aggressively neutral. Its ensemble includes a Black BSAA operative and women who fire weapons and formulate vaccines, yet these facts pass without commentary. Rebecca Chambers is allowed competence, and Nadia is allowed a rifle, but the screenplay has no thesis about gender, race, or representation. There is no LGBTQ content, no racial reckoning, no climate lament, no critique of arms capitalism, no body-positive subplot, no neurodivergent arc. The villain sells death for personal revenge, not as a metaphor for late capitalism. The film is not interested in revising history. It is interested in zombies.

That absence of messaging is not a flaw in itself. Vendetta is a 2017 direct-to-video styled action horror feature based on a video game, and it behaves accordingly. It offers no sermon, no lecture, no tearful speech about the state of the world. The closest it comes to a progressive gesture is letting capable women exist in a male-dominated cast, which is less a statement than a casting reality. The result is a film that can be enjoyed, or endured, without being asked to examine its conscience. It has no conscience to examine. It has a Ducati, a virus, and a monster. For the classification ledger, this is a vintage of almost pure entertainment, with faint traces of incidental inclusion and nothing more.