Resident Evil:
Welcome to Raccoon City
review by Bobby Blakey
The Resident Evil video game series has been literally killing it with fans for years since its debut in 1996. Since then it has had numerous iterations of the game as well as the popular film franchise that spawned 6 entries in the live action, 3 animated features and some TV series. Now the live action film series is being rebooted with the latest entry Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City starring Kaya Scodelario, Hannah John-Kamen, Robbie Amell, Tom Hopper, Avan Jogia with Donal Logue and Neal McDonough with director Johannes Roberts at the helm. Could this latest chapter breathe new life into the franchise or will it fail to rise from the dead?
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City follows the once booming home of pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corporation, Raccoon City that is now a dying Midwestern town. The company’s exodus left the city a wasteland…with great evil brewing below the surface. When that evil is unleashed, a group of survivors must work together to uncover the truth behind Umbrella and make it through the night.
Despite their ups and downs I am a fan of the film franchise. They shifted from straight up horror to more action flicks. This entry is not only rebooting the franchise, but was said to stick closer to the game source material. I was excited to see where they took it and if it reverted back to the horror aspect, but am sad to say it missed almost every mark for me with the exception of some small elements.
The story is fine, but is all over the place and filled with characters I didn’t care anything about. None of them were very interesting and all continued to make stupid decisions that made no sense throughout. I know that is often par for the course in the horror world, but good lord man it was frustrating. Every turn these people did things that made no sense or just plain stupid and made it really hard to care about anything that happened to them.
The first couple of acts to the film limps along with very little happening. They tried to set up a back story for some and disregard others and none of it really mattered. It was all literally just to set up things for the final act and not much else. There are so many elements that could have been trimmed down or just deleted to make this work a lot smoother and cut down on the run time. I started finding it to drag before I finally got to some of the good stuff and by the time it got there I just didn’t care all that much.
On the plus side the final act does bring some good action and creatures. They all look cool and even offers up some great prosthetic work really making it feel like the world of Resident Evil. These elements made up for a lot of it, but sadly not enough for me to ever get fully invested or hope for any more entries into this new version.
Join the fight against the undead and grab your copy of Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City available now on digital and then on 4K, Blu-ray and DVD on February 8th from Sony Home Entertainment.
