Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021) Review
THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS OF THE DISCUSSED FILM. READERS DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
Capcom’s Resident Evil has struggled to be an elite video game adaptation to the big screen, but the involvement of Paul WS Anderson kept that from happening for a long time. Sadly, the struggle continued with its first reboot, Welcome to Raccoon City.
PLOT
The 2021 film takes place in 1998, following Claire Redfield return to the titular city after previously leaving an orphanage back in the 80s to avoid being experimented on by Umbrella Corporation. On her way back, a truck driver she hitch hiked with accidentally runs over another woman who disappears after being struck. When checking the scene, the driver’s dog gets erratic after tasting the woman’s blood. At a nearby diner, rookie officer Leon S Kennedy notices blood coming out of the eyes of the diner’s owner. When Claire reunites with her brother Chris who now works part of RPD’s STARS Alpha team, she shows him video proof of Ben Bertolucci (Josh Cruddas) being her source of Umbrella’s ongoing experiments. As Chris chooses not to believe her when departing to work, she escapes a rabid mother chasing her daughter as well. Back at the police station, chief Brian Irons (Donal Logue) sends Chris’s alpha team to investigate a death at Spencer Mansion due to Bravo team going missing. Chris’ team includes: Jill Valentine, Albert Wesker, Brad Vickers (Nathan Dales) & Richard Aiken (Chad Rook). Things quickly get worse when finding mutant zombies devouring Bravo team. They get to Brad first who crashes their helicopter before eating Richard. Chris, Jill & Wesker keep moving forward in order to figure out what’s going on. Around the time the truck driver gets bitten by his infected dog, Irons is unable to drive out of the city when Umbrella guards fire on those trying to escape, in effort to contain the outbreak. By the time he returns to the station, Claire arrives there and finds Bertolucci in one of the holding cells stuck with an infected inmate that ends up passing the infection to him with a bite. As soon as Claire puts them down, the station gets overran, resulting in her to head to the orphanage with Irons and Leon, hoping to find a secret tunnel to escape. By the time they get there, the chief gets killed by a giant mutant, a ‘Licker’. Thankfully, Leon gets saved by a disabled woman named Lisa Trevor (Marina Mazepa) who remembers Claire and gives her the keys to the tunnel that’ll help them escape to the mansion. As they move forward, they do find one lab room where children were experimented on by Doctor William Birkin. Back at the mansion, Wesker does find Birkin and his family, as he was secretly tasked to confiscate the virus responsible for the outbreak. When the scientist refuses to give it up, he shoots him and his wife Annette (Janet Porter) for it. He almost kills his daughter Sherry (Holly De Barros) as well, but is prevented by Jill who shoots him first. Before succumbing to his wounds, he tells her to take underground train to escape. Leon & Claire are able to regroup with Jill & Chris who now take Sherry with them to the train that’ll lead to their survival. William however injects himself with the virus that mutates him and he chases them all down until Leon kills him with a rocket launcher. The remaining five reach the end of the tunnel and evade Umbrella’s missile strike where the corporation presumes them to have died. The film ends in a cliffhanger revealing Wesker to be resurrected by fellow Umbrella employee Ada Wong (Lily Gao) who gives him sunglasses to help him cope with his visual impairment.
THOUGHTS
Like before, my expectations were quite low going into this reboot, having not played the games and being quite conflicted with the Alice saga. Despite the various changes by writer/director Johannes Roberts that is able to give a proper feeling of isolation given the new production design of Raccoon City, I don’t feel anything new. It feels like the same plot of what we got in 2002 as a tale of survival, just with the focus being on the actual game characters and zero Alice. I don’t even feel moved at all with the re designs of the Licker or the simplicity of the zombies because they still look the same from what we sat through before and Dev Singh’s editing doesn’t exactly do much to spice up the action to make it differ. I don’t want to make any assumptions, but I’d like to believe that if they made it more about the science and give a stronger focus to Neal McDonough as Birkin, we could’ve had a more fluent discussion on the consequential result of corporate greed when investing in the unethical. The fact that wasn’t capitalized is disappointing. And you know what, I don’t even feel a bond with the ensemble here which was a big weakness in the Alice saga. I can buy into Kaya Scodelario being fiercely determined as Claire when it came to wanting to do the right thing originally and I can see Robbie Amell an ideal choice as the more duty bound Chris, but I don’t see them as a believable pair of siblings, nor do I care about Claire’s bond with Lisa. Whatever friendship they had is definitely an excuse for the next checkpoint and I can’t unsee it. I got nothing against Avan Jogia as the reluctant Leon, but him being portrayed that way doesn’t bring any suspense or comedy the way it’s tended to be. I definitely dug the assertiveness Hannah John-Kamen brought as Jill, but it felt too straightforward of an approach. Lastly, I don’t think Tom Hopper doesn’t nail it as the conflicted Wesker. He looks the part, but I’m not interested nor intimidated at all, which makes me care less by the time we reach the cliffhanger. I don’t see the value in Umbrella and Ada bringing him back if he couldn’t even take the virus from Birkin, which makes their intentions feel like a dead end compared to wondering how’d she get to him in time. And that’s just the beginning of things that don’t make much sense storywise. Like it’s totally on Irons to split up because that would’ve helped him survive longer. And it’s so on the trucker to not keep his eyes on the road. It’s even so sad that the diner owner didn’t go to the hospital when Leon spotted her bleeding. I understand she likely can’t afford the hospital bills and driving there would’ve been a hassle given whatever traffic jam that would come from it, but if you’re bleeding from your face and someone sees it, that’s where you got to prioritize on your health at that point. Hell, Wesker should’ve also just grazed Annette if he didn’t want to kill her. Bertolucci is even a dumbass to not kill the infected cell mate the whole time he was stuck there. He should’ve killed him way before going for Leon’s gun. It then got so annoying how three different characters moved around so quietly when others weren’t paying attention. Sherry did it, Wesker did it and one of the zombies did it which made no sense at all. Lastly, how does Chris not know of chat rooms? I get that was a new thing in the late 90s, but as a cop, he should know of the earliest form of social media that the internet was assembling for future investigative purposes. If you can ignore these things, then I salute you. To wrap up, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is a reboot that can’t help sticking with the previous formula and doesn’t take enough of a risk to be separate from the predecessor. If this disappointed you as well as a gamer and don’t want to bother with the Netflix show, then I promise you the Zach Cregger version will not disappoint you in authenticity to the source material.
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