Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City
Directed by Johannes Roberts

I was in denial for a long time, but the warning signs were always there. A Thanksgiving release to avoid competing with other horror movies, not a single review up and no buzz online, a final trailer that used the He-Man meme song for irony(?), and really rough-looking CGI in the trailers that actually showed something. Even with all of this, I still hoped that somehow Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City would be okay. Not even okay, just, entertainingly bad. I would settle for laughing at the movie, so long as I was having fun. Resident Evil didn’t even rise to that. This is one for the record books. Whenever people talk about the worst video game movies, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is going to have to be part of that conversation, because this movie hurt me.

Where do I even start with this? The story here is that Claire Redfield travels back to Raccoon City to check on her brother Chris, but he’s not in trouble until he gets called away to the Spencer Mansion because a until was sent there earlier and is missing but we don’t know why they were sent there in the first place. Also, Chris’s unit, STARS, is hanging out adjacent to put upon rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy, who is also the main character but he never does anything. So then zombies happen and everything becomes a convoluted mess. The Resident Evil games were never known for their stories, but those stories were better than this, and least things happened in the games, and we weren’t switching back and forth between three separate plot lines that don’t completely link together until the very end.

What’s so strange is that this movie goes out of its way to spend a lot of time giving people backstories, setting up their characters, and establishing basic personalities for them, but as soon as the “action” starts, none of that matters. No character gets any further development, which makes the beginning so bizarre, like why spend so much time telling me everything about Leon’s backstory and everything about Claire and Chris’s backstory, and a bunch of stuff about Jill and her team when we could be killing zombies instead? Not that it would have helped as the action sequences are glacially paced, tension-less exercises in not giving a crap, but between character exposition that will never come up again and bad zombie fights, I’ll take the bad zombie fights.

I don’t know about you, but I assumed there would be a lot of action and we would get to it fairly quickly, maybe even starting in media res to get this started on a high note. Nah. You’re almost halfway through the movie by the time the zombies show up, and even then they don’t do anything until STARS gets into the mansion, which really makes me wonder why so much of the movie takes place outside of the mansion. All the actual plot happens there, all the action happens there, there’s a chance for some scares or some fun Resident Evil puzzles, so why is so much of the movie in this lame town? Not to say the scenes in the mansion were good, they were dull to look at, the action wasn’t shot well, and there was no fun allowed, but at least it was a location where conceivably interesting things could happen.

I haven’t even started on how stupid this entire movie is. The classic bad movie goof, the old “If I wasn’t also in the frame when a gun is shot or a car crashes or a helicopter careens into a building I am standing in, then I cannot be aware of it” happens multiple times in the same scene! That’s an amateur mistake! Someone looking over the script could point that out! And whenever a reasonably interesting monster shows up they’re killed instantly and never pose any threat! It feels like this movie was made wrong on purpose as a joke but even if it was it would still be a failure because there’s never any punchline to anything. Was this movie made to make the other Residents Evil movies look good in comparison?

These actors are trying. They are really giving their all to this crappy movie but they have absolutely nothing to work with. With a better script that’s way tighter and more focused, I could see this cast playing these characters well, and it’s not like the performances are terrible, they just aren’t really there, and I can’t imagine they received great direction on set. How could anyone get any attention when there is so much garbage they’re trying to jam into every frame? Usually, I don’t mind Easter eggs and little winks to the fan base, but when so many iconic characters, lines, locations, monsters, and even shots are super-glued together with no care for context, then how could something good come from that?

Sure, some of the monster designs are alright, but zero points because those were simply lifted from the games with no thought as to how this works visually in a film medium. Speaking of things lifted from the games, the reason that this plot feels like such a convoluted mess is that it combines the plots of at least three Resident Evil games into one film, without any thought to pacing or story structure. This is one of the most baffling things to me. Why take story elements and characters from different games and mash them together instead of just making a movie with one solid narrative? I feel like I’ve asked more questions during this review than any other in recent memory. Because that’s what the new Resident Evil does to you, it pushes you past the boundaries of logic and makes you question your own sanity. And if any of you are reading this and thinking that this sounds amazing and must be a hilariously funny movie, you are wrong. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City killed the energy in that theater so badly that everyone left grumbling and muttering under their breath. Why was this movie made? The zombie boom is behind us. The zombie bust is behind us. Resident Evil itself has moved far past its origins in Raccoon City, so let’s all collectively move past this movie, and forget it ever happened.