Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City – Film Review

Welcome to Raccoon City – once the booming home of pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corp. The company’s exodus left the city a wasteland, a dying town with great evil brewing below the surface. When that evil is unleashed, a group of survivors – Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario), Chris Redfield (Robbie Amell), Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen), Albert Wesker (Tom Hopper), Leon Kennedy (Avan Jogia) – must work together to uncover the truth behind Umbrella and make it through the night.

The Resident Evil video game franchise has been near and dear to my heart for several years now. And while the original games are a total blast, my personal favorites are the two newest entries Biohazard and Village. But really, the whole series has a dark and eerie feel to it. When playing the games, one gets the sense that, while the setting feels very empty, deep down inside you know that there are some truly chilling visitors lurking around every corner.

It’s just so disappointing to see the Resident Evil movies fail tremendously when it comes to capturing the spirit and heart of the games. And although Johannes Roberts‘ Welcome to Raccoon City is without question the most faithful film adaptation of any Resident Evil game to date, it still isn’t a good film whatsoever. Surprisingly though, this film showed gargantuan promise with its first twenty minutes.

The atmosphere was dark and unsettling, propelled even further by the stunning cinematography by Maxime Alexandre and the lack of music throughout. Roberts’ script initially started off feeling like a psychological thriller set within the Resident Evil universe which sounds like perfection to me. But sadly, as the film enters its second act, the storyline becomes frustratingly messy and divulges into trope-filled territory. There’s quite literally nothing new or inventive when it comes to this film.

Sure, a lot of people that go and see this movie are probably only going to want to see some badass people kill some zombies while maybe saying a few cheesy one-liners every so often. Do you get that in Welcome to Raccoon City? Yes, you certainly do. But however fun that may be, it quickly wears off because you eventually come to the realization that Roberts truly had no idea what to do on a story front with this film. It’s honestly just a film about a group of people who shoot things and walk around an empty city. It’s entertaining and amusing, but only for so long. Then it just gets old.

A lot of the actors here didn’t seem to have too much fun being involved with the project either. Kaya Scodelario has proven herself time and time again to be a tremendously talented actress and she typically chooses some seriously good movies to act in. I don’t know what she saw in this film that enticed her, and truth be told, I think she may have regretted starring in the movie during the filming of it. She looks incredibly bored the whole time and it’s just a bit sad to see.

Hannah John-Kamen is one of my favorite actresses of the past few years, and I wish she were in more films because here, in the role of Jill Valentine, she proves once again just how charismatic and fun she can be. I just really wish we could have seen this performance in a better movie. Unlike Scodelario, John-Kamen seems like she had a genuine blast while filming Welcome to Raccoon City.

The film also contains one of the most abrupt “WTF” endings I have seen in quite some time, as well. It almost seemed as though the filmmakers actually filmed more footage but somehow it got lost, and it would have cost them too much to do reshoots so they just went “Well… I guess we can just end it here?”.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City isn’t complete garbage. It could have been a total trainwreck, but it did have some solid things going for it in its first act. It’s just a shame that it had to go so downhill so fast.