YMMV / Resident Evil Film Series

• Ass Pull: The series gained some infamy for its continuity breaks and retcons, so it has its own page.
• Base-Breaking Character: Alice herself is the most controversial character in the films. Some like her because of her ridiculous badassery, Ms. Fanservice status and for being Milla Jovovich's most memorable role (for better or worse), while others (usually fans from the games) hate how she is a Invincible Heroine who steals the spotlight of the game characters and has little personality aside from her revenge against Umbrella. A third camp applies the same mindset as to the entire film series and considers her Narm Charm incarnate.
• Cliché Storm: The films feature every major action cliché in the book. This includes the main character becoming an Empowered Badass Normal, Easy Amnesia, Expendable Clones, Guns Akimbo, Stuff Blowing Up, Bullet Time, and a villain having familial ties with the main character.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Creator's Pet: Alice rarely if ever loses a fair fight in the entire series, is constantly outworking other characters (especially from the games), and eventually has the whole story orbiting around her. The fact that she's a Canon Foreigner has made fans of the games refer to this film series as the most expensive fanfic ever.
• Critic-Proof: Despite being reviled by both critics and many fans of the games (most notably Roger Ebert, who included the first two films in his most hated film list and never reviewed any of them after that), the films did quite well at the box office and it is still one of the highest grossing horror film franchises around (it was also the highest grossing franchise in the horror genre until it was surpassed by The Conjuring Universe). Supposedly, the reason why Capcom let director Paul W.S. Anderson get away with savaging the games' story with every film was due to how profitable all of them were being in spite of it, and they seemed to have no negative effect on sales of the games.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Though Alice is given ship tease and has Unresolved Sexual Tension with Matt and Carlos, to the point that a clone of the latter was selected to play her husband in a sequel, most fan prefer to pair her with Claire, due to the fact that she is the only game character who appears in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, and the fact that Claire has to kill her boyfriend Doc when he betrays her. It helps that Milla Jovovich and Ali Larter also have good chemistry with each other. On Archive of Our Own and Fanfiction Dot Net, the pairing dominates the fanfiction about the movies.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • The movie series and its fans have been met with scorn and bile from the main Resident Evil fanbase due to the movies Canon Defilement and sidelining the actual game characters for Alice.
  • More downplayed with the Underworld (2003) fandom as while there isn't any outright hostility, but Alice vs Selene is a common Hypothetical Fight Debate, due to both being badass Action Girl protagonists of horror-adjacent franchises beginning in the early 2000s
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The film series is popular in Russia, somewhat also owing to Milla Jovovich's Slavic heritage.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Plenty of viewers only watch the films to see Milla Jovovich be a ass-kicking Ms. Fanservice.
• Les Yay: Alice at one point in the first movie, caresses Rain, and jokes that she wants to kiss her. Alice also has some tension with Jill and Claire, and K-Mart has an implied crush on Alice.
• Narm Charm: If you don't take the over-the-top action and fanfic-ish scripts seriously, they become a pretty entertaining popcorn flick kind of run.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: "Clairice" or "Aberfield" for Claire Redfield/Alice Abernathy. Some fans combine them into "Clairice Aberfield".
• Sequelitis: The first film does a pretty good job of capturing the essence of the franchise, albeit with its own original characters. Aside from a couple bits of baddassery, the characters' abilities were pretty realistic and the film generally focuses on the dreadful atmosphere the games are known for. After that, Alice got increasingly more powerful, killing off any potential drama, became pretty much the only character to be a badass, and the series ramped up the action to exaggeratedly cartoonish levels, basically ripping off the physics-defying stunts in The Matrix without any of that film series' in-story justifications. The critical response to the films dipped after the first movie as well. It really didn't help that the films cared very little for continuity, seeing how they constantly retconned and contradicted central plot points and Sequel Hooks from the previous installments with every film that came out, with The Final Chapter being the worst offender.
• Values Dissonance: Half the characters in this movie series seem to smoke. Even characters that never smoked in the games, such as Claire and Jill, smoke. And Smoking Is Cool is in full effect with gratuitous camera pans and long takes of characters just taking a huff or lighting up their cigarettes, playing the stereotype of the trope to the hilt. They're even weaponized multiple times. Nowadays, such an excessive amount of smoking would be frowned upon after tobacco became a highly criticized product, and especially for how much it's emphasized here.

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