{"id":12150,"date":"2025-06-20T16:54:32","date_gmt":"2025-06-20T20:54:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=12150"},"modified":"2025-06-20T16:54:32","modified_gmt":"2025-06-20T20:54:32","slug":"resident-evil-welcome-to-raccoon-city-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2025\/06\/20\/resident-evil-welcome-to-raccoon-city-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City<\/strong> (2021)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screen Gems\/Horror-Sci-Fi\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 107 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (strong violence and gore, language throughout)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Johannes Roberts\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Johannes Roberts\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Mark Korven\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Maxime Alexandre\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: November 24, 2021 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: $17M (US)\/$42M (World)<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: * \u00bd<\/p>\n

\u00a0Or 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<\/strong>, concrete proof that the term \u201cThe Final Chapter\u201d isn\u2019t worth a farthing. What\u2019s worse, it really didn\u2019t need to be made.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Written and directed by Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down), Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City<\/strong> 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\u2019m not a gamer so none of it means anything to me. I\u2019m not even a big fan of the movie series. I wouldn\u2019t say any of them are terrible, but none of them qualify as classics either.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The 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<\/strong>. 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\u2019t thrilled to see her. He\u2019s 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\u2019s not having any of it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I 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\u2019ve created a serum that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0To be fair, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City<\/strong> starts off okay. For a while, it\u2019s like a throwback to the survivalist horror movies of the 70s and 80s. The one that popped into my head was 1984\u2019s 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\u2019s when ineptitude took over.<\/p>\n

\u00a0WOW! There is so much wrong with Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City<\/strong>, it\u2019s hard to know where to start. I know, I\u2019ll start with the half-assed screenplay. The story makes no sense and never comes together like it should. It\u2019s light on details and introduces subplots that ultimately get dropped. At one point, a character says that Umbrella put something in the town\u2019s water supply. It\u2019s mentioned that one time and never brought up again. It\u2019s predictable as well. When a dog licks infected blood from the road, you immediately think \u201cZombie Dog!\u201d It\u2019s that kind of movie.<\/p>\n

\u00a0You know what? Why don\u2019t I just cut to the chase? This movie is a lame, scare-free affair with bad acting, murky visuals and some unfortunate CGI. It\u2019s difficult to make out what\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The performances in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City<\/strong> are almost unanimously lousy. The only performance with any life to it is Donal Logue (Gotham) as a police captain who isn\u2019t 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\u2019t having any fun, the audience won\u2019t either.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The sad thing is Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City<\/strong> could have been great campy fun. It\u2019s set in 1998 meaning it\u2019s populated by old school idiots rather than millennial ones with their faces glued to iPhones. It makes good use of the pop song \u201cCrush\u201d by one-hit wonder Jennifer Paige. It had potential, but Roberts makes a big mess of it. It\u2019s 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.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screen Gems\/Horror-Sci-Fi\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 107 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (strong violence and gore, language throughout)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Johannes Roberts\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Johannes Roberts\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Mark Korven\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Maxime Alexandre\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: November 24, 2021 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Kaya Scodelario, Hannah John-Kamen, Robbie Amell, Tom Hopper, Avan Jogia, Donal Logue, Neal McDonough, Chad Rook, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12180,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-horror","category-sequels-remakes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Resident-Evil-7-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12150"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12182,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12150\/revisions\/12182"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}