Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021) Screen Gems/Horror-Sci-Fi RT: 107 minutes Rated R (strong violence and gore, language throughout) Director: Johannes Roberts Screenplay: Johannes Roberts Music: Mark Korven Cinematography: Maxime Alexandre Release date: November 24, 2021 (US) Cast: Kaya Scodelario, Hannah John-Kamen, Robbie Amell, Tom Hopper, Avan Jogia, Donal Logue, Neal McDonough, Chad Rook, Marina Mazepa, Janet Porter, Holly De Barros, Sammy Azero, Dylan Taylor, Nathan Dales, Josh Cruddas, Pat Thornton. Box Office: $17M (US)/$42M (World)
Rating: * ½
Or as I like to call it, The Reboot NOBODY Asked For. I thought we were done with this nonsense after Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. HA! I should have known differently. Now, nearly twenty years (after the first RE) and six movies later, we get Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, concrete proof that the term “The Final Chapter” isn’t worth a farthing. What’s worse, it really didn’t need to be made.
Written and directed by Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down), Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is an adaptation of the first and second games of the popular video game series by Capcom. It contains characters and scenarios that will be familiar to fans. I’m not a gamer so none of it means anything to me. I’m not even a big fan of the movie series. I wouldn’t say any of them are terrible, but none of them qualify as classics either.
The best thing the old RE movies had going for them was Milla Jovovich who looked like she enjoyed tapping into her inner bad ass as the formidable heroine Alice. Neither Milla nor Alice are anywhere in sight in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. Instead, we get Kaya Scodelario (Crawl) delivering a flatline performance as Claire Redfield, a former resident of Raccoon City who chooses the wrong night to come home. Her brother Chris (Amell, The Babysitter), a member of an elite law enforcement team, isn’t thrilled to see her. He’s still mad at her for leaving him behind when she ran away from home (the local orphanage) years earlier. She tries to warn him something bad is about to go down, but he’s not having any of it.
I guess you could describe what happens as a zombie outbreak. The town is basically run by The Umbrella Corporation, one of those sinister pharmaceutical outfits always conducting illegal experiments on unwitting human subjects. As near as I can figure, they’ve created a serum that’s supposed to turn people into super-soldiers, but turns them into crazed zombies instead. So it is that Claire, Chris and a few others spend the night fighting off the infected while looking for a way out of Raccoon City before Umbrella blows it all up.
To be fair, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City starts off okay. For a while, it’s like a throwback to the survivalist horror movies of the 70s and 80s. The one that popped into my head was 1984’s Mutant, a low-budget job with Wings Hauser and Bo Hopkins. I also thought of Assault on Precinct 13 and Night of the Living Dead. It even has an ersatz John Carpenter score. This could be fun, I thought. My small glimmer of hope flickered out after about 40 minutes. That’s when ineptitude took over.
WOW! There is so much wrong with Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, it’s hard to know where to start. I know, I’ll start with the half-assed screenplay. The story makes no sense and never comes together like it should. It’s light on details and introduces subplots that ultimately get dropped. At one point, a character says that Umbrella put something in the town’s water supply. It’s mentioned that one time and never brought up again. It’s predictable as well. When a dog licks infected blood from the road, you immediately think “Zombie Dog!” It’s that kind of movie.
You know what? Why don’t I just cut to the chase? This movie is a lame, scare-free affair with bad acting, murky visuals and some unfortunate CGI. It’s difficult to make out what’s going on in a lot of scenes due to poor editing and lighting. The last half is essentially characters skulking through dark places, some getting picked off by zombies and other creatures.
The performances in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City are almost unanimously lousy. The only performance with any life to it is Donal Logue (Gotham) as a police captain who isn’t exactly dedicated to his job. The rest are terrible. Everybody, especially Scodelario, looks bored. This includes the usually reliable Neal McDonough (I Know Who Killed Me) as the villain, a mad scientist with no regard for human life. If the actors aren’t having any fun, the audience won’t either.
The sad thing is Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City could have been great campy fun. It’s set in 1998 meaning it’s populated by old school idiots rather than millennial ones with their faces glued to iPhones. It makes good use of the pop song “Crush” by one-hit wonder Jennifer Paige. It had potential, but Roberts makes a big mess of it. It’s disheartening instead of fun. I doubt even fans of the game will like this entirely unnecessary film adaptation. I hope this reboot is an instant GAME OVER.
