There’s clearly a lot of love behind the camera of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. This reboot is intended as a love letter to Capcom’s original game series, supposedly taking the franchise back to its roots by almost directly adapting the first two games. Everyone involved is a huge fan of the series. But that doesn’t make Welcome to Raccoon City a good film. Quite the opposite, sadly.
The fact that we have yet another bad Resident Evil movie (even though there is some campy fun to be had in the Alice series) will be a disappointment to many, given the series’ potential. But Welcome to Raccoon City, for all its nods and Easter eggs, does very little right in the way of actually being a good film. For one thing, it’s extremely dull. Very little of consequence happens in the first hour, and the atmosphere that director Johannes Roberts builds (which is admittedly rather solid in the first few scenes) is lost when he refuses to escalate anything until the very end of the film, by which time it’s too late.
Although the cast all put in some decent performances, the material they’re working with is weak. These characters are mere whispers of actual people, and virtually impossible to connect to on almost any level. Throw in a bunch of needless explosions, ugly CGI, unexplained plot points that make no sense to people who haven’t played the games, and the total lack of an ending, and we’re left with a mess that even some decent zombie prosthetics and a cast as hot as this one can’t save. A shame.
RESIDENT EVIL: WELCOME TO RACOON CITY is released on DVD, Blu-ray, 4K UHD February 7th
