grintemcstinger

This hardly compares to the original Content Cop episodes. It used to be about highlighting and calling out bad online behavior or content and had high production value for YouTube standards, a good sense of humor, and was more often than not well-founded criticism. While not every point made was always on the spot, it at the very least made for a very entertaining piece of internet culture.

This new, so-called episode after so many years has none of that-it's just more of the same low-energy, low-effort content Ian has put out in the last couple of years. It has a weak intro slapped onto it along with one poorly done and highly cringe 2-minute skit following it. The rest is just rambling and arguing along with video snippets of the opposing party. His delivery is weak, and the editing is basic. The humor is forced, and nothing seems to come naturally together. There are a bunch of questionable segments, such as involving a psychologist for a really petty reason, among others. I do not know much about H3; his content never appealed to me, but it does not strike me as a good choice of topic for a content cop, especially considering what else is out there.

There used to be joy and playfulness along with a certain swagger and confidence in Ian's videos. His points used to be much better thought out. Nowadays he seems to be unable to generate good content even if he tried his hardest and appears to have little self-awareness. This episode is just petty drama between two parties who seemingly used to be friends and now are having an argument involving hot topic politics, which just should've entirely stayed private. It certainly does not make for good content.

Adi Shankars Castlevania series was already hit and miss, so my expectations of his take on DMC were already cautious.

Devil May Cry starts out pretty interesting in the first two episodes but then descends more and more into something that feels quite distant from the series, involving some out of place political commentary, among other things. Its main problems are that it is not faithful to the games despite many sprinkled-in details and references; those are only superficial. It fails at the most important aspects: the characters, none of which are good representations of their source material. The biggest offender between them is the character Lady: Were it not for her face (and even that is not quite the same, as she has no scar) and hair, she might as well have been an entirely new character. Her background is changed for the worse, and while not a bad attempt, it just pales in comparison to her much more flashed out and impactful story in DMC3. She has none of her signature traits and weapons (one only very briefly), looks like a character out of Astral Chain and is quite unlikable due to her incredibly silly dialogue (Adi Shankars trademark excessive cussing-it's beyond parody at this point...) and some blockhead decisions she makes to top it off.

Dante is kinda just there... His problem is that he is not as important to the plot as Lady is. He pretty much is a secondary character here and is acting a tad bit too silly and comes of as a try hard.

The biggest trump this series has is its action and the animation of it. It is truly excellent in places and a joy to watch. There also will be moves that fans of the games will recognize. It is dynamic and fast while not chaotic. This is thanks to occasional clever use of 3D models, but it also makes the mistake of using them in more static and slower scenes, which is distracting as it makes them notably stand out from the other visuals.

It also makes some faux pas with the choice of music... It truly baffles me why they had to license songs like Crazytowns "Butterfly" or Limp Bizkits "Rollin" which hardly match the mixture of goth/electronic/groove metal the games had. Especially since they also used music from the games, and the new music made for this series is also not bad. It's just not a good fit and better reserved for AMVs.

Voice acting is also quite mixed. The choice to give Dante the voice actor who did Nero in the games is odd to say the least. He does a good job, but it just does not sound right... I do have to wonder what they will do if they ever introduce Nero at some point. The voice actress of Lady I found pretty bad. Some of her lines do not sound clear, almost mumbled. Why not give this role to the original VA Kari Wahlgr... Hold on, she is actually in this!? Why not let her voice Lady? But then again, with that dialogue and being so unlikeble, it may be for the better.

But the worst part by far are the social and political commentary and allegories that are showed in for no good reason. Regardless of which political points are made, the original Devil May Cry games never had any of it and it truly does not belong here. Its a disservice to the franchise and appears that Adi abuses it to push his own views and agenda.

For every jackpot this Netflix series hits, there are plenty of busts that counter it. I would love if things would change in the next season for the better and maybe try to cater more towards faithfulness with character traits, but knowing how Castlevania turned out, I have little hope. This is worse than the 2007 Anime, which itself was not great and lacked the action, but had at least some interesting aspects and approaches while still remaining consistent with the world of games. This Netflix one just gets a D - Dismal.

The concept of Resident Evil does not sound like something that should be too difficult to make a decent, enjoyable movie out of. The original games (and by those, I mean anything mainline before RE4) are not really known for their story, but for great thrills, spooky suspense, bloody, uneasy atmosphere and horror.

The logical step for a movie based on it would be to keep it very light on exposition and story details and focus on suspensful situations and scenarios instead; however, this movie (and also all the previous ones) does the exact opposite and is even so insitent on it that it even takes content from the first two games, the second of which even has two main campaigns.

I suppose they were not confident in their talent to come up with suspense, so they had to fill the runtime with convoluted story queues and references from the games. They tried with a couple of slower scenes topped off with jumpscares, but those were all flat, cheap, and just poorly executed. Nothing that would pull anyone in. It would have required someone with a much stronger vision and sense for suspense.

To the movies credit, it does try to be very faithful to the games in some areas. Particularly the environments looked very accurate to how they looked in the games. But even that felt cheap at times. A lot of it looks and feels fake and is quite obvious CGI (the police main hall with the big statue being one of the main offenders). Included is also a bossfight from the game - even if it was executed poorly again, they at least tried. They obviously did their homework and played the games and used plenty of references, even if a bit too much, but it is the execution that severely lacks here. It is used to no proper effect or excitement.

Speaking of CGI, it is distractingly bad, particularly the explosions and gun fire will stick out in how unauthentic they look.

They were, however, not faithful with the characters, both with the casting and with the writing. Wesker got it worst, followed by Leon and Jill. If you're a fan of the games, you will be annoyed with what those characters have become and how they feel nothing like the ones from the game. They behave often unnaturally and are not believable, with Chief Irons being easily the worst, and Claire is also very dull.

Even the zombies look off and are just annoying.

There is some horrible use of licensed late 90s music in this movie, that I feel the need to mention it as it is just perplexingly awful. The scene where Jennifers Page's "Crush" was used, stood out as it was remarkably out of place and plain dumb. What were they even thinking with this one?

The overall feel of this movie is somewhere in between a Boll movie and cheap fanfiction.

Concepts of movies like "Cube", "The Raid" and "Dawn of the Dead" (obviously) would be a great inspiration for a Resident Evil movie. They perfectly showcase that less is more and where the focus should be.

Ironically, there were big names attached to RE movies in the past that would have been a much better fit, such as George A. Romero and James Wan. But Constantin Film yet again came through with its poor decisionmaking and incompetence. As long as they and Paul W. S. Anderson (who is an executive producer here) are involved, there is little hope we will ever see a movie that does the franchise justice.

The decision to hand such a big name as Resident Evil to someone like Johannes Roberts, who, judging by his imdb movie list, has only directed poorly rated movies, is quite baffling, and the quality of the resulting movie is no surprise.