Review: Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)

 Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)

Rated R for strong violence and gore, and language throughout

Score: 2 out of 5 (objectively), 3 out of 5 (as a Resident Evil fan)

I have heard Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City described as the movie that, if not for Paul W. S. Anderson's more divergent take on the source material, one might have expected them to make twenty years ago when the Resident Evil games were at the peak of their glory. Not merely set in 1998 but rooted in very '90s horror sensibilities, this film combines the plot and events of the first two games in the series into a single, somewhat coherent story that, if you've never played the games, probably won't leave much of an impact on you that you couldn't get from any number of other zombie movies, especially given the long mark that Resident Evil left on the genre. Barring some inspired visual design and solid direction from Johannes Roberts, there really isn't much to offer here for people looking for a good horror flick.

As a fan of the games, though? Holy hell, this movie was fanservice central to such a degree that I was willing to bump my score up a point on purely subjective grounds. From start to finish, this felt like a pure fan film, made for and by people who grew up playing the classic survival horror titles on PlayStation 1 and therefore knew what this movie was supposed to look, sound, and feel like -- and had the budget to more or less pull it off. Yes, the plot and characters are altered from the games, particularly in how it expands the backstories of two of the series' central characters, and as a whole movie, it still doesn't really work. But... I'm sorry, I'm just a sucker for all the little touches here, the frequent visual and dialogue nods to the games that go so far as references to their gameplay. My experience watching this was a kinda stupid, ho-hum movie that nonetheless constantly found ways to put a smile on my face. Objectively, this movie is cheesy and kinda bad, but given the games' legendary reputation in that department, I still somehow felt that, barring the writers, everybody involved understood the assignment. It's still not the perfect adaptation, far from it, but as a movie that honors the games' spirit, I'll give it a pass.

This film is set in 1998 in the small Midwestern town of Raccoon City, former home of the Umbrella Corporation, a pharmaceutical giant that recently moved its facilities and employees elsewhere and left behind only a skeleton crew and those who didn't have the money to leave this Rust Belt dump. (I'm pretty sure that this plot element, which wasn't in the games, was less about exploring the plight of the American working class and more a rewrite done at the height of the pandemic to explain why they couldn't shoot any large crowd scenes.) All of the toxic experiments that Umbrella did have gotten into the town's water supply, particularly a nasty little bugger called the T-Virus that turns people into raging psychos who bleed from the eyes and have a craving for the flesh of their fellow man... in other words, zombies. From here, we follow two stories. The first, lifted from the second game in the series, concerns Claire Redfield, a young woman raised in Raccoon City who's now returning home to learn the truth about her and her brother Chris' childhoods spent raised in an Umbrella-run orphanage in the town. Along the way, she teams up with Leon S. Kennedy, a rookie cop who was dumped in this dying town because he couldn't hack it on the big-city force and is now going through the mother of all training days. The second plot, lifted from the first game, concerns Chris Redfield and his colleagues in the Raccoon Police Department's Special Tactics and Rescue Service (or "STARS") team, seemingly the last cops in the town who haven't left entirely, getting sent to a remote mansion in the woods just before the shit hits the fan in Raccoon City proper to investigate a series of brutal murders, whereupon they discover exactly what Umbrella was up to in their town.

The manner in which these two plots are fused together is clunky. I've always been of the opinion that a proper film adaptation, or first season of a Resident Evil TV series, should've been based on the first game alone, perhaps with elements drawn from the prequel Resident Evil 0, and that they should've saved the scenes of the living dead overrunning Raccoon City for the sequel. For all their other faults, the first two movies in Anderson's film series understood this. The first was a claustrophobic action/horror flick inspired by Aliens, and it was only with Resident Evil: Apocalypse where they expanded the scope and stepped up the set pieces and monster mayhem. In terms of tone, the two stories just don't really go together, and so it is here that we get what feels like two separate movies based on two separate games awkwardly bolted together, on top of various subplots that ultimately contribute little. The way that William and Annette Birkin, the scientists whose work paved the way for the disaster in Raccoon City, are treated here feels almost like an afterthought, thrown in only because they were important characters in the second game and the movie needed a third-act monster for the heroes to fight. The story of Chris and Claire having been raised in an Umbrella orphanage and experimented on as children, for all that the film focuses on it in Claire's side of the story, also felt like it had surprisingly little bearing on their characters, doing little to really flesh them out as people given how they otherwise hew extremely closely to their character arcs in the games. Overall, the story felt like a jumble of random events haphazardly strewn together to get something resembling a plot, I couldn't bring myself to care about any of the characters beyond their immediate presence, and I was more or less turning my brain off thirty minutes in.

Fortunately, that's exactly the mindset I needed to enjoy the rest of this movie. I said before that this movie is a feast for fans, whether they're recreating iconic moments from the games (I was not expecting HUNK, Lisa Trevor, or the Ashford twins, of all people, to show up) or having a laugh at their many goofier moments, most notably a very cheeky reference to a line of dialogue from the first game that was so stupid it became iconic. I especially liked how the film took one bit from the first game, a diary you find of a man slowly succumbing to infection and turning into a zombie, and played it for horror by having people infected with the T-Virus retain some of their humanity in the earlier stages of zombification, best represented in a scene where zombies are banging on the doors of the police station and some of them are quite clearly begging for help. The actors all looked the part, and seemed to understand that they were playing action figures rather than fleshed-out characters, having a blast shooting zombies while doing their best to not make the dialogue insufferable. Robbie Amell and Kaya Scodelario looked and felt exactly like what I imagined a live-action Chris and Claire to be, and while Hannah John-Kamen looks little like the Jill Valentine from the games, she still managed to feel like what I imagined Jill to be, especially with her one-liners marking a nice contrast to Claire. Avan Jogia's Leon, in terms of his appearance, felt like a mix of that character as he appeared in the second game and Carlos Oliveira, a character from the third game who was cut from this version of the story. Tom Hopper's Albert Wesker, the shifty cop who betrays the rest of his team, was really the only character who didn't feel like his video game counterpart, played here less as a slick, handsome villain and more as an aggressive jock, and it's no surprise that he's the one who was changed the most in the translation; regardless, even if he was different from how I remembered him, I liked Hooper's performance and thought he had a pretty interesting motive going on.

The real quality here was mostly in the director's chair courtesy of Roberts, an old pro at horror B-movies like 47 Meters Down and The Strangers: Prey at Night. The man knows how to get things done on a low budget, which is why I'm not surprised that this movie is filled as it is with striking visuals and claustrophobic tension. Even with shaky CGI for creatures like the Licker and the final boss (so to speak), he managed to give them a real presence, while also making the ordinary zombies an ever-present threat where even one of them could wreck the main characters' day. At its best, it felt like a particularly tense playthrough of one of the games, dropping you into a situation where ammunition is finite and yet there are still a lot of bastards between you and your destination. It was cheesy, often willfully so, such that I can't really call it scary, but if anything, that's what really propels the film more than anything else, such that I barely felt its 107-minute runtime fly by.

The Bottom Line

Even with how long it's been since I saw any of the Anderson films, I can't honestly call this the best Resident Evil movie. I can, however, call it the most faithful, not just in terms of plot but more importantly in spirit. It's a very stupid movie, and after 25 years it can feel derivative, but it captures the B-movie spirit of the early games like no other film has. I can't honestly call it good, but I recommend it as both an imperfect curiosity for Resident Evil fans and as something to throw on when you have friends over.