The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B-
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is easily the best Resident Evil movie. Sure, that’s a pretty frigging low bar for a series that went six movies without even getting the genre of its source material right. And sure, this thing is far from perfect. The plot is sometimes borderline incoherent (especially for anyone that isn’t familiar with the games) and some of the special effects look like they were created on a Commodore 64. But, all things considered, Welcome to Raccoon City is a fun, though not particularly memorable, love letter to the video game series.
Kaya Scodelario (from the Maze Runner series and the last Pirates of the Caribbean) stars as Claire Redfield, who is returning to her hometown of Raccoon City to find her brother, Chris. The town has hit hard times lately because the Umbrella Corporation, a massive pharmaceutical company that basically employed the entire town, recently moved and crippled the local economy in the process. Claire thinks that something more sinister than mere corporate douchebagery is afoot and suspects that Umbrella has somehow contaminated the town. Her suspicions are quickly validated and the town is overrun with zombies and various other monsters.
The plot becomes more complicated than that and, about halfway through the film, it dawned on me that I’m not sure if someone with no knowledge of the games would have the slightest fucking idea what was happening. I’m still not sure. I basically have a cursory knowledge of the video game series (Resident Evil 4 is the only one that I’ve played all the way through, but it is one of my all-time favorite games), but that knowledge came in pretty frigging handy. As mentioned, this movie aims to be a love letter to the games and it succeeds almost to a fault. Many moments feel like fan service (albeit effective fan service) and work as a live-action representation of an established property, but the film as a whole doesn’t work as well when considered as a stand-alone film. Therefore, I’ll review this for two audiences: fans of the Resident Evil games and people that have never played one in their lives. I’m somewhere in the middle, so I feel like I have such massive authority.
For fans of the video games, Welcome to Raccoon City is, in many ways, the kind of movie that you’ve been waiting for since the 90s. Director Johannes Roberts is a clearly a big fan of the franchise and loaded the movie with things that longtime fans will recognize. The film recreates locations, scenarios and even exact shots directly from the first two games. I only watched my brother play those games 25 or so years ago and I instantly recognized the main hall of the mansion and the lobby of the police station. The film even recreates the iconic shot from the first game that gave gamers their first glimpse of a 3D video game zombie. On the downside, I’m not sure why the filmmakers opted to combine the plots of the first two games (I would have preferred if they had just focused on the mansion plot from the original Resident Evil) and the movie goes a bit overboard with introducing characters from the games purely for the sake of cramming them into the narrative, and nowhere is that tendency more evident than in the groan-inducing mid-credit scene. It doesn’t quite reach Moral Kombat: Annihilation levels of unnecessary characters, but it does feel like the filmmakers were trying to stuff as much shit into this as they could in case they don’t get to make a sequel.
Of course, none of that means a damn thing if you haven’t played the games. In that case, this will likely just be an average, and somewhat confusing, zombie movie. The script doesn’t go out of its way to explain things in detail, so uninitiated viewers will likely be left with just the vague notion that pharmaceutical leak = zombies and monsters for some reason. The extensive gallery of characters and combination of plots from multiple games won’t help matters, either, as the disjointed narrative will only seem more fragmented if you aren’t appreciating the fan service along the way.
Whichever camp you fall into, you will probably appreciate that this movie has a key element that the other Resident Evil movies lacked: it’s actually a horror movie! Yep, they got the genre right. It’s not the greatest zombie horror film, but it is actually trying and that’s enough for my incredibly low bar. The special effects are wildly inconsistent, though. The zombies look good for the most part when actual makeup effects are used, but the film often resorts to computer effects and they look mighty fucking awful. The greatest offender would have to be the frequent use of CGI fire. I know that I’ve criticized this in past reviews, but why the fuck can’t people just make actual fire anymore? It’s really distracting whenever a set is being burned down by what looks like a screen saver. Also, the final battle is unintentionally hilarious, as somebody decides to hire a bazooka in a confined space at a target that’s about ten feet in front of him. That’s not how motherfucking bazookas work and you would all be dead.
This movie is fine. I wish that this had been the first Resident Evil movie, as it probably would have been better received in the early 2000s, but it’s entertaining enough for what it is and finally captures the spirit of the games in a way that was severely lacking from the previous movies. If you are a huge fan of the game series, then you may get more enjoyment out of this. If you’ve never played the games, then you can probably lower my grade to a C. I’m right in the middle, which makes this a resounding “not bad” for me.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil%3A_Welcome_to_Raccoon_City#/media/File:Welcome_to_Raccoon_City.jpg
