Granted, Resident Evil wasn’t that anti-corporate. Sure, Umbrella is still the bad guy, but it isn’t there all of the time. It’s existence is acknowledged and I think it’s mentioned only once, but Acme on the other hand… they are pure evil and we are reminded of that over and over.

Was Coyote vs. Acme shelved to hide the anti-corporate sentiment? Maybe, but if that was the case, who was stupid enough to ever greenlight it? Or maybe there’s a hero within the company who got it made despite the message. Who knows? It isn’t shy either. When the Warner Bros logo is shown at the beginning of the movie, it’s actually accompanied by a small print text saying something like “A wholly owned subsidiary of Acme Corporation”. I won’t go into Resident Evil about this until I get to spoilers.

Coyote vs. ACME is a very unlikely movie. Sure, there are constant attempts to keep every possible intellectual property alive, but this isn’t the kind of thing companies generally want to take a risk on. The concept is funny, but not in a way where some executive in their sixties will understand (says the 49-year-old).

So, Coyote is doing his usual thing where he tries to get the Road Runner, but fails again in painful ways. We see two pretty standard ways he tries to do this early on. Afterwards, he goes back to his cave to plan again, when he sees an ad on TV for a legal service that promises to get money for these kinds of accidents with the tools. So, Coyote draws up a new plan, the first step of which is to get to the city to meet the lawyer. However, it takes us a while to see the whole plan, which should tell you all about what’s actually in there.

In Resident Evil, we hear Bryan discuss his girlfriend’s pregnancy on the phone as he is driving. He can’t quite handle the discussion as well as he should. He then gets on with his job of delivering an organ to a hospital. He was supposed to go home, but instead he takes on another job when it’s mentioned that it pays well. Except that now he has to deliver the thing to a town high up in the mountains, which means that he now needs to drive into winter conditions, for which he isn’t quite ready. On the way, he hits a woman who survives the accident, but behaves weirdly…

So, these are very different movies. Both are quite violent, both are quite funny, in just very different ways. And yes, this is a pretty forced way of trying to tie these two together. At the same time, these are anomalies. They are mid-budget movies ($70 million for Coyote vs. Acme, $75 million for Resident Evil) which feels like something that’s finding it’s place again after a couple of decades of studios just pushing out movies with huge budgets, both are anti-corporate and despite both being franchise movies, they feel like these weren’t just movies-by-committee. There’s a vision behind them and I can wholeheartedly recommend both. Well, as long as you are fine with the goriness and body horror of Resident Evil.

Sure, MCU had it’s moments, but in general, when you just let creatives do their thing, they will come up with something fun and/or interesting. Sure, everyone knew after Barbarian and Weapons that Greggers would make a movie worth seeing, but did anyone expect anything from Green? Well, he definitely did something here. If you let the execs rule, they will just try to wring out every drop out of the IP before letting it go, and because they are over-confident, they will try to make the decisions themselves instead of letting someone else do it.

Both of these also have great perspectives.

Coyote vs. Acme is a satire on court dramas, but it is also very much a cartoon. Sure, they borrow quite a bit from Roger Rabbit, but that’s very much okay. Coyote is too iconic to really have a character arc, but we do learn about his and Road Runner’s relationship. Road Runner is such a weird character. He just wants to run and occasionally eat, but yet he is like an all-powerful godlike being. There’s a moment in the movie where Acme throws all of their resources to catch him and it just doesn’t work. Coyote is just relentless. After all, he is going against a god with subpar equipment. Yet, he just goes on. What would happen if he ever did catch Road Runner? This doesn’t feel like a children’s movie, but it has a dubbed version here in Finland which means that at least the distributor feels there’s a potential audience of children.

Resident Evil is a movie that both embraces and sheds it’s video game origins. I’ve never played the games, nor do I remember anything about the movies (not even which ones I’ve seen, and I just found out there’s a short-lived TV series), but it seems like this movie follows established lore just enough to qualify as a Resident Evil movie. Bryan is way out of his depth. He only knows guns from games and that doesn’t really translate to real life (well, you learn how to aim, but video games don’t tell you much about guns from mechanical point of view). You definitely could analyze the movie from a video game point of view (different maps, objectives, learning curve, introductory enemy, sometimes we get first person), but I don’t think that’s going to be very fruitful. Unlike Alice, Bryan is just a guy. The writing is great. There’s so many set-ups you don’t immediately identify as one.

Just go out and see them.

Spoiler section. Not that long this time. I just wanted to say something about Umbrella’s involvement.

Of course we know Umbrella is involved, because of course. Yet, that doesn’t come up in quite a while. At one point Bryan is being chased by a zombie monstrosity consisting of a bunch of people it has picked up on the way. This is actually sort of in the trailer. Bryan gets saved from this thing by two people, one of which is from Umbrella. He is there basically to tell Bryan his next objective. He dies not that much later.

I think this is the only time Umbrella is mentioned. However, this is where I don’t really know how to approach this. Corporations are evil. By definition, they have to prioritize making money over well-being of humans, so they are destructive by their nature. Sure, I’ve owned corporations (small ones), and I don’t want to think of them as evil, but when you are small, you are much more closely tied to your community, so that safeguards you from your evil nature.

Yet, in the movie, the zombie outbreak is depicted more as an accident than something that just happens when corporations get involved. The corporation is not evil, they are just incompetent. Sure, big corporations in real life are stupidly incompetent, but that’s because they are evil. They want to save on everything, and doing things badly is often cheaper, so they’ll just do that instead of making sure they are doing things well.

Yet, this movie sort of feels like it’s giving them an excuse of a clumsy scientist fucking things up. Please don’t do that.