To quote Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City’s zombie dog: woof. This thing is bad. A reboot of the franchise known for its downright batshit stories and Milla Jovovich ass-kicking action, Welcome to Raccoon City seeks to position the story much more faithfully to the games themselves, attempting to adapt both the original 1998 classic and its follow-up and doing none of it particularly well. In fact writer-director Johannes Roberts’ film is so obsessed with referencing these games that it forgets to have any identity of its own, let alone a comprehensible story; a mishmash of poorly executed action, weak characters and a general sense of carelessness all around.
After a brief flashback bombards you with easter eggs and little else, we find ourselves introduced to Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario) on her way back into the ramshackle Raccoon City to warn estranged brother Chris (Robbie Amell) of a conspiracy involving sinister pharmaceutical company Umbrella. Irked by his sister’s sudden reappearance Chris heads off with his specialist police unit – Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen), Albert Wesker (Tom Hopper) and Richard Aiken (Chad Rook) – to investigate a disturbance at the ominous Spencer Mansion, created by the founder of Umbrella. When residents of the city begin to zombify and violently attack one another Claire finds herself holed up at the Raccoon City police precinct with rookie Leon Kennedy (Avan Jogia), the pair forced to team up to uncover Umbrella’s plot before the city is unceremoniously wiped off the face of the earth in an effort to contain the spreading plague.
If the Paul W.S. Anderson films were derided for their refusal to cohere to any sort of franchise lore, adapting whatever they felt like and cramming it into a jumble of mindless action, then Johannes’ film seeks to go the other route. Almost every scene feels like a sensory overload of easter eggs and scenes pulled directly from the game in an effort to have the viewer constantly yell at the screen “that’s Lisa Trevor!” or “that’s the truck crash from Resident Evil 2!”. Meanwhile the story itself is a mess of these incoherent scenes stitched together without any connective tissue, as if Roberts’ believes the appeal of the games are simply the cut-scenes and not the story uncovered through actually playing it. The player appreciates the cut-scenes because of the context they have been given by actually playing the game. Simply throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the screen in the hopes that it bears a resemblance to what the audience has already played is a surefire way to ensure they disengage from having any genuine investment in the story or characters.
Admittedly you can see that Roberts’ is clearly a fan of the games, with a high attention to detail for recreating those iconic moments as accurately as possible. Where he stumbles hard is in that connective tissue. Welcome to Raccoon City is a downright dumb movie, riddled with inconsistencies and stupid plot conveniences. Take a moment early in the film, for instance. Claire is attempting to get into a house, trying the front and back doors before eventually picking the lock. The character whose house it is then has an extended exchange with Claire about how advanced the security systems are, but when Claire attempts to leave that place in a hurry she finds his motorcycle outside with the keys conveniently already in the ignition.
It’s a small gripe, but one that speaks to a larger problem. Where the security discussion was meant to establish Claire as a jack-of-all-trades and highlight her quick thinking, the following easy exit completely contradicts it and shows that everything going forward will be as convenient as it needs to be to move the story forward. In a similar way the film is timestamped in the hours leading up to 6am in an effort to ramp up the tension before the inevitable explosion… only in the intervals between timestamps Roberts’ forgets to check in with all his characters, meaning people have barely moved or done anything at all in the preceding hour.
That being said there are a few positives to be found. Kaya Scoledario is rock solid as the tough-as-nails Claire. She gets easily the most character development to work with and whilst those flashbacks are poorly unraveled, the effect the trauma from Claire’s past has had on her is evident in her performance in small moments of hesitation. The action is largely forgettable, with Roberts’ preferring to show only quick flashes rather than true set-pieces, but there are some genuine moments of claustrophobic terror mined from close encounters in cramped corridors that harken back to that primal fear associated with playing the games.
While Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City isn’t the worst film the franchise has put out, it is certainly close to it: a dismal attempt to more faithfully adapt the games that neither succeeds in doing that or telling a compelling story. So much has been forgone in the pursuit of accuracy that the resulting film isn’t even all that much fun, a foundational pillar of the whacky Alice films. Thank you for the welcome Raccoon City, but I’d like to leave now and never come back.
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City stars Kaya Scodelario, Robbie Amell, Hannah John-Kamen, Tom Hopper, Avan Jogia, Donal Logue, Chad Rook, Marina Mazepa & Neil McDonough – In cinemas now.