Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City

The sleepy town of Raccoon City is about to get a nasty surprise.  Returning home for the first time in years, Claire Redfield finds herself trapped as a viral outbreak ravages the small town, turning its denizens into hordes of the undead.  At the same time, a simple search and rescue mission finds Claire’s brother, Chris, and his S.T.A.R.S Alpha Team walking right into ground zero of where the nightmare began. With time running out before both are overrun, the Redfield siblings and a small group of survivors must band together to reunite and escape before its too late.

While it might be the most financially successful Video Game Movie franchise of all time, the Resident Evil films have never been anything but “meh” at best, terrible at worst.  Critics wrote them off as more dumb, visually overblown action fare and longtime fans of the franchise decried them for ignoring most of the original storyline from the games while pushing their favorite characters to the side in favor of the super powered but dull movie exclusive protagonist, Alice.  Well with Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil saga finally over, the time has come to relaunch Resident Evil and properly this time.  Welcome to Raccoon City attempts to give franchise fans the experience they’ve longed for with the characters they adore.  Is this reboot what the film series should have been from the beginning?
 
From the first few minutes of the film alone, you can tell the filmmakers wanted fans to know they were going to try and adhere closer to the games than before.  Iconic locations like the Main Halls of the Spencer Mansion and the RPD make welcome appearances and there’s plenty of tiny Easter Eggs for eagle eye fans from costume recreations to simple items like keys and ammo boxes.  Naturally, several of Resident Evils most popular monsters appear too like Zombie Dogs and Lickers and man the Lickers look even better than ever.  Welcome to Raccoon City even goes a few steps further by setting the events of the film in the proper year they took place in the games, 1998.  That means tons of references to staples of the decade: Blockbuster, Walkmen, Nokia Phones and Palm Pilots, the movie never misses a chance to remind us the 90s were cool.  The attention to detail is fine from an aesthetic end but I wouldn’t say it makes Welcome to Raccoon City truly great.  After all, you can recreate Chris’ look from the HD Remake game but when Jill snatches a sandwich from Wesker and says “This is Jill’s Sandwich now,” you know the movie is gonna be a bit painful at times. 
 
If it’s one thing Welcome to Raccoon City absolutely nails it’s the atmosphere.  This feature is a step back from the loud and boringly bombastic action spectacles of the Anderson Saga.  Raccoon City might not be as big as its normally presented in the games or earlier films but the abandoned, darkened, rainy streets all add to that growing feeling of dread and the fact that even before the T-Virus gets rolling, this isn’t a fun place to live.  While it does work in the movies favor, it’s also a double edged sword.  It takes almost an hour for the chaos to kick in and while dialing back the action compared to previous films isn’t a bad thing, Welcome to Raccoon City dials them back a bit too much.  In a one hour and forty seven minute feature, there’s hardly any action in the first hour and when it does happen from that point on, it's pretty brief, over before you know it.  Terror is fine, it’s Resident Evil after all.  But excitement is also a key factor in its success and most times, Welcome to Raccoon City is just begging for something exciting to happen for more than a few seconds. You can also tell the movie is working with a reduced budget compared to past outings.  The abandoned, rainy streets are fitting but the number of infected in Racoon City is minimal and the aforementioned Licker and Zombie Dog, there’s only one of each plus a couple of other Monsters that appear.  It makes this adaptation of one of the most important events in Resident Evil history feel way too small and unimpactful (I cant believe I’m thinking Resident Evil: Apocalypse was the better representation).
 
Cast wise, I like most of the choices here.  While they share criminally few scenes together, Kaya Scodelario and Robbie Amell are both great as Claire and Chris Redfield and they have fun chemistry together as estranged siblings but siblings nonetheless.  As Welcome to Raccoon City adapts the first two games of which the Redfields were lead players in, theyre both at the center of these two halves of the movie as well.  Scodelario has the more central role as Claire and some of the more dramatic and emotional moments of the film too.  I liked her as Claire, able to make her a both no nonsense bad ass but also a young woman still dealing with the trauma of her childhood that caused her to abandon Raccoon City in the first place.  I’ve always liked Robbie Amell and he’s a great, early days Chris.  He mostly handles the action side of things and actually gets the most visually and creatively shot sequence of the whole film, true Resident Evil moment there.  Tom Hopper plays a very different Albert Wesker, more early days and less meglomaniacal than his Video Game counterpart but he’s fun.  MVP of the casting is definitely Avan Jogia as Leon S. Kennedy.  Leon serves mostly as comic relief in the movie but his moments are genuinely funny and Jogia makes it work nicely.  The only two characters who feel woefully underdeveloped and underutilized are Jill Valentine and William Birkin, played by Hannah John-Kamen and Neal McDonough respectively.  Jill feels like she’s barely in the movie and when she is, she’s mostly there to pin over Wesker.  As for McDonogh, he can play an amazing bad guy but he never gets a chance to go full ham until the last bit of the movie.  Before then, his motivations are sparce and unexplained.  All in all, not everyone gets a lot with their roles and how theyre portrayal is handled will vary from fan to fan.  But they do what they can and everyone is far better served than in the Anderson movies (no Alice to steal anyone spotlight). 
 
Like I said back in the casting comments, this movie adapts the storylines from the first two Resident Evil games: The Spencer Mansion Incident from RE1 and the Raccoon City Disaster from RE2.  While it doesn’t do the worst job divvying up time between these two equally important plotlines, you do get the feeling that one has a higher priority than the other and that’s Claire’s story.  We spend most of the film with her and learn more about her history than anyone else in the movie.  Chris gets a couple of small character snippets, including a movie only tie in to the Birkin family and barely gets any more info beyond that.  The only other character who gets any real screentime dedicated to their individual plot is Wesker and its so rushed you hardly learn anything from it.  Admirable as it is that the film tries to tell multiple tales at once, I think Welcome to Raccoon City should have chosen one lane and stuck to it.  Personally, I would’ve gone with Raccoon City because A. it’s in the title and B. the Mansion got a passable adaptation already in the first Resident Evil movie.  Not to mention with how slow the build up to the outbreak is, the last 45 minutes are rushed like crazy, leading to a last act that’s suddenly realized the movie is almost over and it now has to work overtime to tie everything up as best it can.  And while it does have some moments, the ending is probably the most underwhelming part of the whole movie.
 
Is Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City better than the films that came before it?  Is it the true Resident Evil experience fans have always wanted on the big screen?  Ehhhhh… honestly, I think the first Paul W.S. Anderson movie is a fun watch if you look at is as a stand alone film and not the beginning of a terrible franchise.  So that would make Welcome to Raccoon City maybe my second favorite film in the franchise then. Yeah it has all the characters but it doesn’t do anything deep with anyone outside of Claire.  The scale of the movie is so small you can feel it was made on a reduced budget.  The Monsters, locations and game references are there but you wish they did more with all of them.  I’d say this is a good second draft of what a Resident Evil movie could be but there’s a lot of issues that need to be addressed with pacing, character development and expanding the action just a little bit.  It’s a step in the right direction, but not the most rewarding trip to Raccoon City I’ve ever had.  Maybe next time.
 
5/10