90s RE was B-movie schlock. Infamous for amateur line delivery, awkward dialogue, and bathos in spite of otherwise being great survival horror experiences.
RE1 remake was a recalibration, able to achieve the oppressive and haunting atmosphere the original attempted to try, with a much more serious and focused script that still played to the heart of the original.
People joke about Whedon-style writing but it was a response to tired genre conventions of the time. Self-awareness and being able to play around cliches(key word play around not just acknowledge their exitence and play it straight) was a big innovation of the era. RE4 tilted straight into it; no longer the naive rookie cop and free from the Umbrella obsession that hung over the franchise, Leon was a wise cracking action hero, Biohazard's James Bond, who barely questions supposedly dead people like Ada or Krauser being alive, instantly clocks Wesker as being involved, and though he gets the villagers aren't zombies, he immediately understands there's something bigger in play.
But RE4 2023 is two decades away from the original. Now Whedon-style writing has become so pervasive, especially after his brief control over the MCU and how it metastasized into everything since, that now the zeitgeist searches for "new sincerity/post-post-modernism," a hunt for Zeldas and Dragon Quests in an age of Dragon Ages and Forspokens. RE2 wasn't just a cheesy gorefest anymore, RE1 writ large, Leon wanted to help people and barely got out of the city with two other people and that had meaningful longterm personal consequences that he was still reckoning with in RE4 because ever since RE4 came out, any pre-RE4 rendition of Leon was always trying to reconcile his RE2 incarnation with his codified most popular incarnation. The two biggest RE games complimenting each other.
Anyway either way by Death Island he's cheerful and cracking jokes while blowing up hordes of BOWs and running into Jill under Alcatraz.