Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City Review

I’ve been reviewing all things Resident Evil here at The Outerhaven for a solid 4-5 years now, from Resident Evil VII to Resident Evil Village, both remakes, and even both the live-action and CGI animated movies and TV Shows. So you could say that I’m either the Resident Evil expert here on the site or that guy who is so obsessed with the series that he will take any chance to talk about it. So when I had a chance to see the new Resident Evil movie, which is a reboot of the franchise, I was more than happy to venture into the world of survival horror once again.

Title: Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City
Production Company: Screen Gems
Distributed by: Sony Pictures Releasing
Directed by: Johannes Roberts
Produced by: James Harris, Hartley Gorenstein, & Robert Kulzer
Written by: Johannes Roberts
Starring: Kaya Scodelario, Hannah John-Kamen, Robbie Amell, Tom Hopper, Avan Jogia, Donal Logue, & Neal McDonough
Based on: Resident Evil by Capcom
Release dates: November 24, 2021
Running time: 107 Minutes
Rating: R

Welcome to Survival-Horror…

Claire Redfield and her older brother Chris are children living at the Raccoon City Orphanage. Claire befriends Lisa Trevor, a disfigured girl who has been experimented on by Dr. William Birkin, an employee for the Umbrella Corporation, who oversees the orphanage and takes children for his own experimental research. Claire escapes from Birkin when she is selected to participate in an experiment.

In 1998, Claire returns to Raccoon City, hitchhiking in a semi-truck. The truck driver accidentally hits a woman in the middle of the road. While Claire and the driver are arguing, the woman becomes zombified and disappears. The truck driver’s Dobermann licks the blood she left behind, and, over time, begins to foam at the mouth, becoming erratic. Meanwhile, Leon S. Kennedy, a rookie police officer new in town, notices that the diner’s owner has blood coming out of her eyes.

Claire heads to Chris’s home to warn him about Umbrella’s experiments, revealing Ben Bertolucci as her source of information. After Chris leaves for the police station, a child breaks into the house, running from his mother, who attacks Claire; both mother and child have severe hair loss, are erratic, sick-looking, and bloody. Claire escapes on Chris’ motorbike.

At the police station, the STARS Alpha team meets with Chief Brian Irons, who explains that the Bravo team went missing while investigating a death at the remote Spencer Mansion. The Alpha team, composed of Chris, Jill Valentine, Richard Aiken, Brad Vickers, and Albert Wesker, is sent to the mansion by helicopter to investigate. They discover the mansion overrun by zombies.

Unknown to his teammates, Wesker is an operative for an unidentified party, tasked with stealing Birkin’s virus, using inside knowledge to navigate the mansion. Their helicopter crashes into the mansion after the pilot gets bitten by a zombie. Chris and Richard encounter zombies eating the bodies of the Bravo team. Richard is eaten while Chris battles the horde, reuniting with Jill. The pair flees into the secret passage Wesker unlocked.

Back at the police station, the truck driver, bitten by his dog, transforms into a zombie and crashes his truck into the station. Chief Irons tries to drive out of the city but is stopped by Umbrella guards who shoot civilians attempting to escape so they can contain the outbreak. Returning to the station, Irons is attacked by the truck driver’s zombie dog but Claire rescues him. Claire and Leon retrieve weapons and encounter Ben, who is locked up in a cell. Ben is bitten by a zombie inmate before he can escape his cell.

The police station becomes overrun by zombies, and Leon, Claire, and Irons escape to the Orphanage, looking for a secret Umbrella tunnel in the building. A licker kills Irons and attacks Leon, but he is saved by Lisa. Lisa recognizes the grown-up Claire and gives them the keys to the secret passage. The pair discovers the secret lab where Umbrella was experimenting on children like the Ashford Twins.

Wesker encounters Dr. Birkin. In the ensuing scuffle, Wesker is shot by Birkin, shoots him back in response, and kills his wife in defense. When Wesker hesitates to pull the trigger on their child Sherry, Jill shoots him. Before dying, Wesker tells them to escape via the underground train before the Umbrella Corporation destroys the city. Chris finds that William has injected himself with the “G-Virus” to survive. Chris, Sherry, and Jill, Claire, and Leon escape to the train. The train is stopped when Raccoon City is blown up, allowing a now-mutated monster version of Birkin to attack them. Leon saves them by shooting the monster with a rocket launcher, killing it for good. As the Corporation states that there were zero civilian survivors in the aftermath of the destruction, the five-member crew walks out of the train tunnel, leaving Raccoon City behind.

In a mid-credits scene, Wesker awakens in a body bag, unable to see anything. A mysterious figure then hands him sunglasses and reveals herself as Ada Wong.

S.T.A.R.S. Roll Call

• Kaya Scodelario as Claire Redfield
  Since Claire is the protagonist of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, it would make sense that she would be a really good character. To be honest, yeah she is a well-written character, if not more of a hot-head than she is in the games, and she is the one who can do EVERYTHING perfectly and has no problems with the idea of zombies being a thing in the first place. If anything, Claire seems too perfect and Kaya does a good job with what she had written for her.
• Hannah John-Kamen as Jill Valentine
  Since Jill was the original protagonist of two major games, you’d think she’d be the character that we would go with for the movie? Nope. Instead of the smart, witty, and sensible Jill we got in the games, this version has been replaced with a gun-crazy sharpshooter who has a romantic thing for Wesker… Eww. So this makes 2 versions of Jill where things are messed up character-wise. The big difference here is that Hannah doesn’t seem to care about the limited time she is on screen and does little to stand out in moments where she needed to stand out.
  
• Robbie Amell as Chris Redfield
  Good old straight line Chris. I’m not really sure what to say about a character who has no character, to begin with. Chris is just a straight-line babyface good guy and nothing more. He is doing what he is told and will protect others without any issues. For some reason, this was enough to make him one of the final group, but it doesn’t really make sense. Amell does a good job with the character, but just about anyone could have played this role just as well as he did.
• Tom Hopper as Albert Wesker
  Hopper as Wesker is a really interesting case since the guy is meant to play the role of a character who is one step ahead of everyone else. However, since this is an origin story, we have more of a Wesker who doesn’t know what is going on but is just following orders of someone who gave him a bunch of money. Through the events in the Spencer Mansion, he seems almost lost and has concern for taking a life. This is the complete opposite of the game character who knows what’s going on at all times, is one step ahead of everyone else, and will do anything to complete his objective.
• Avan Jogia as Leon S. Kennedy
  Complete screw up here. Jogia looks like he is uncomfortable with the role he was given, and it shows through the whole film. As a character Leon is a complete dumbass, knowing nothing about what is going on nor does he look like he knows anything coming out of Police training either. A completely horrible and badly written role.
• Donal Logue as Chief Brian Irons
  I’m a big fan of Logue since his time playing Detective Bullock in Gotham and having him in a very similar role here in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is perfect for him. I just wish that he had a more expanded role in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City where we got to see his creepy side more than just the angry Police Chief we got to see here. Maybe having him work with Wesker or something. The guy really did deserve more.
• Neal McDonough as William Birkin
  Who would have thought that the guy who played an Irish M.Bison in Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li would make a really good and creepy William Birkin? Well, McDonough really did a good job with one of the main characters in the Resident Evil series. As Birkin, he looks like the guy who is going to do anything to keep going with his “god’s work” involving the T-Virus and G-Virus. They really push that he is the mind behind everything, from the research on Lisa Trevor and the Ashford Twins to working experiments on a young Chris and Claire to the creation and use of the G-Virus. This is a great bad guy. As G-Birkin, I wanted to see more from the monster, including more forms since we only get forms 1 and 2 in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City instead of the third form that ends Resident Evil 2.
• Lily Gao as Ada Wong
  She looks the part, acts the part, and was used in a mid-credits sequence… NEXT!
• Chad Rook as Richard Aiken
  A weird character choice here as the Aiken character is used to replace Barry Burton for the most part. Yet there is so little for Rook to do with the character that you wouldn’t be forgiven for forgetting that he was even in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, to begin with.
• Marina Mazepa as Lisa Trevor
  As one of Umbrella’s experiments, we get to see Lisa from two different perspectives: A young child whom Birkin first experimented on, and later as a grown woman who helps her “friend” Claire for one moment. It’s weird to see such a stalker of a creature to just be used at the beginning of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City only to disappear for a majority of the film and reappear for about 5 minutes in the third act. It would have been a better use of the character to have her stalking Claire through Raccoon City from the shadows than helping in the end. A real shame here.
• Janet Porter as Annette Birkin
  Wasted character. Get introduced late in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City only to die a few minutes later in a shootout with Wesker.
• Holly De Barros as Sherry Birkin
  Another wasted character. Sherry shows up in the third act, sees her parents get killed, then is found by the survivors to be added to the group because the game’s narrative demanded it. I think the whole Birkin family deserved a larger role and have been capped from trying to squash two games’ worth of story into one movie.
  
• Nathan Dales as Brad Vickers
  Chicken-heart appears and I love it. He does nothing, but to see one of my favorite LetterKenny TV show actors get a role in a major movie is worth a small pop.

Resurrection of Evil

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is one of those movies that would appeal to the hardcore fanbase really well. Just about every moment in this movie has something from the games recreated to a perfect look or feel, with most of those references coming from the first 2 Resident Evil games, both original and remake versions (There are references to other games like Resident Evil: Code Veronica, and others, but it’s mostly the first 2 games). While Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City doesn’t follow the story of these games too well, the appeal will mostly fall upon these references to keep the game’s fanbase at bay and distracted from the film’s faults. However, when these moments hit, like seeing familiar places like the R.P.D. building, the foyer of the Spencer Mansion, and Raccoon Orphanage recreated in real life, the fanboy in me was shocked and amazed at how good these moments looked.

Something else I don’t do often enough in movies like Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is praise the use of practical make-up and effects when it comes to monsters. Personally, I see this as a lost art that not enough filmmakers use these days as CGI is just less time-consuming and possibly more cost-effective these days. However, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City uses 100% practical effects for the zombies and the Lisa Trevor character, something that most filmmakers wouldn’t do. By going this route it makes the interaction between zombies and survivors look and feel a lot better than any other recent movie featuring zombies.

A Failed Experiment

While Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City does seem like that Resident Evil movie that the fans have wanted for a long time, it isn’t quite there yet. sure, we got the right characters, right locations, right moments, and references, yet at the same time everything was so crushed together that Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City comes off as trying to give too much to the audience that people who do not have a huge amount of the lore locked into their brains, like me, will get confused and ultimately see Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City as a bland experience.

The issues come from three things:

• The Plot
• The actor selections and writing
• The audio mix

The plot is the simple one to explain. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City tries to mix the story of Resident Evil 2 with parts of Resident Evil and some new elements that try to tie everything together, but ultimately have zero payoffs, in the long run, except for one moment when Lisa Trevor helps Claire get into the secret Umbrella lab from the Orphanage due to them all living in the same Orphanage when they were kids. Outside of this one moment, there is just too much going on to have a focus on one part of the story overall.

The actor selection and writing are next, with some of the choices of an actor either lessening the role, or there were some notes from the Studio or Director that downplayed others roles in the overall story. Take Jill Valentine, for example, she has an iconic look and is one of the major players in the franchise, yet in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City she comes off as a crazy gun nut sharpshooter and doesn’t even have her signature look from the games, instead she has a basic S.T.A.R.S. uniform… and she has a thing for Wesker… Eww. Then there is Leon, who is still a rookie cop, but he is written like the dumbest set of bricks on the planet, and I feel sorry for Avan Jogia as he just does not feel comfortable in the role, and it shows. Plus, we have no Barry Burton… WHY!?

The last thing I want to touch upon is something that a lot of people were complaining about after Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City ended, and that is the sound mix. I’m not sure if it was the cinema’s sound volumes, or the actual audio from the movie, but there were too many high-pitched screams during zombie attacks, combined with high-pitched audio queues to “enhance” the moment that it was very off-putting to many people. Other complaints came from the direction of the audio, where the sound channels got mixed up and you had something from the right of the screen sounding to the left of the screen and vice-versa.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City suffers from the big problem of trying to push two games’ worth of story into one movie, and this means that a LOT of plot and characters are left with very little to do. Creatures like Lisa Trevor and G-Birkin deserved expanded roles, characters like Richard Aiken and Jill Valentine deserved more to do, Wesker needed more time to develop into a villain, and then there are the missing elements: Barry Burton, Mr. X/Tyrant, and Nemesis. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City really needed to take some elements from Resident Evil Zero and Resident Evil in this movie, then move into Resident Evil 2/Resident Evil 3 in a sequel. With the way Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City ended, we have no idea where the franchise can go from here without screwing up the overall timeline or screwing up this own established canon. But hey, at least we finally got the good reference-filled movie that Resident Evil fans wanted from the original series.

Review Disclosure Statement: Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City was provided to us by Sony Entertainment for review purposes. For more information on how we conduct and handle reviews here, please visit our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy for more info.