Studio: Screen Gems
Director: Johannes Roberts
Writer: Johannes Roberts
Producer: Robert Kulzer, James Harris, Hartley Gorenstein
Stars: Kaya Scodelario, Hannah John-Kamen, Robbie Amell, Tom Hopper, Avan Jogia, Donal Logue, Neal McDonough
Review Score:
Summary:
Estranged siblings join a ragtag band of police officers who must escape a dying mountain town before it becomes overrun by zombies.
Review:
Writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson’s series of six “Resident Evil” films starring Milla Jovovich certainly enjoys its fair share of ardent supporters. But for every admirer of those action-oriented sci-fi stunt shows, there remained an equal number of fans who wished the movies would more closely resemble the characters, continuity, and haunted house creepiness of the video games they were originally adapted from.
Enter writer/director Johannes Roberts. With the flagging franchise primed for a cinematic reboot, Roberts went back to the beginning to mine the people, places, and atmosphere-intensive horror directly from Capcom’s classic property. This birthed “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City,” a film faithful to the fiction and feel of the first few games, but one that underperformed critically and commercially, especially when compared to the Jovovich vehicles it was supposed to supplant.
Disappointing ticket sales should have been expected. “Welcome to Raccoon City” released at a time when COVID concerns continued to keep audiences out of theaters. In pre-pandemic days, those same audiences wouldn’t have thought twice about seeing a marginal movie like “Resident Evil” at a multiplex just because they had nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon.
Studio suits angling for a different excuse won’t necessarily see it that way though. They’re liable to look at what happened and conclude, “We finally gave the game’s fans what they said they wanted and they didn’t bother to show up. Guess what we had going with Anderson and Jovovich wasn’t so bad after all.”
The thing is, the filmmakers didn’t actually give the game’s fans what they wanted. Oh sure, several shots and locations expertly echo their 128-bit inspirations right down to every last digital detail. Popular characters, too many in fact, make notable appearances in one form or another. Memorable setpieces such as destroying a Tyrant with a rocket launcher and escaping town via underground train feature as major beats. Then there are plentiful Easter eggs and in-jokes like a “Jill sandwich” included to make the most devoted diehards smile.
Yet while the production design team stayed busy focusing on fan service, Johannes Roberts forgot to connect everything with a sensible story, or any story at all. What is “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City” even supposed to be “about?” Flashbacks start the film with Claire Redfield, who is returning to the titular locale to see her estranged brother Chris and get to the bottom of the Umbrella Corporation’s secret experiments on orphans. So is the movie about reconciling their fractured relationship and problematic past? Not really, because after their chilly reconnection, the siblings separate and don’t see each other again until the finale. Is the movie about exposing an evil company’s corruption as it creates a deadly zombie outbreak throughout a dying mountain town? Also not really, because we only ever meet one man from Umbrella, William Birkin, and never see a resolution or real repercussions befalling the company itself. Maybe there’s a redemption arc in there somewhere? Only if you count unlikable Leon S. Kennedy being unreliable dead weight in need of repeated rescue until he finally does something proactive during the climax. I honestly cannot identify what the story is supposed to be, unless it’s just about people fighting off feral mutants as they shuffle between two points for poorly defined reasons.
Staleness starts with stilted scripting. During Claire’s opening ride into town, a truck driver asks, “What are you doing out hitchhiking on a night like this anyway? Oh yeah, going to see your brother, you said. Right. Used to live here, you said.” A little later, a fellow cop hazes Leon with, “You must be the rookie. I heard that you shot your partner in the ass during training and that your daddy, some big shot on the force, had to bail you out. Now is that why they transferred you to this sh*thole town?” Gee guys, speak in exposition much?
Awkward though those monologues may be, they’re almost preferable to some dating advice the police chief sarcastically offers to Wesker. He actually says, “Maybe you can take her out to eat at Planet Hollywood. Or maybe just take her back to your apartment. Rent a movie at Blockbuster, get cozy on the couch, put on some Journey.” I get it. “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City” takes place in 1998. But who in the real world ever speaks in era-specific references designed to deliberately date their dialogue?
Loaded with TV actors rather than silver screen stars, the cast doesn’t contain a single standout except for veteran “with” performers Donal Logue and Neal McDonough. The fresher faces come with generic good looks, but they’re indistinct in appearance and ability to the point where key characters resemble random red shirts. The top-billed actress, who I’d wager has fewer onscreen minutes than almost everyone underneath her, never alters her vacant expression, keeping her mouth an even line and always standing listlessly, making as much of an impression as a coat rack someone forgot to remove from the stage. I won’t even bother looking up the name of the actor who boringly plays Leon. I’m confident if he ever pops up in a future film, he’ll be unremarkably unnoticeable there too.
What then does “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City” have going for it? Nothing but the usual assortment of formulaically forgettable frights like flickering lights, creepy dolls, suddenly waking from nightmares, hands grabbing shoulders from behind, a children’s choir la-la-la’ing, flashlights waving around, and tiptoeing in dark rooms. It’s all a whole lot of basic blah blah blah, unsurprisingly resulting in a movie that’s just as blah as everything in it.
NOTE: There is a mid-credits scene.
Review Score: 40
While the movie works as an atmosphere-building slow burn, the lack of substance in the story makes “Black Cab” harder to get into as a narrative.