‘Every story has a beginning. Discover the origin of evil...’
As of this, the year of our lord, 2022, there has been seven films in the Resident Evil franchise, six from Paul W.S. Anderson, this prequel from Johannes Roberts plus a Netflix television series, and yet, not one of them has got to the essence of what made the video games so popular in the first place. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City comes closest, but this still ends up feeling like a missed opportunity…
Raccoon City is a ghost town. Held together by a skeleton staff and few hardy locals, the town is all ready to shut down completely. But then, strange things are afoot at the infamous Spencer mansion and it appears that local cop Chris Redfield (Robbie Amell), his sister Claire (Kaya Scodelario) and the spectacularly named Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen) hold the key to survival. Meanwhile, bad guys William Burkin (Neal McDonough) and Albert Wesker (Tom Hopper) attempt to protect the interests of the Umbrella Corporation – a malicious and out of control pharmaceutical company.
Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way. Welcome to Raccoon City spends forty five minutes on character development and world building before we even step foot inside the Spencer mansion. Unfortunately, it does these things badly. Resident Evil – the first game in the franchise – begins in medias res, and it seems writer-director Roberts has learnt nothing from that game’s runaway success. The last thing anyone needs to see in a zombie movie is the slow burn of the apocalypse’s beginnings. We have seen this in movies and TV shows a thousand times.
All of this is a shame, because when we do finally reach the mansion, we are gifted with the best 45 minutes in any Resident Evil movie. The first six movies were never really interested in using the games as inspiration, but this film wisely lifts cut scenes wholesale from the source material, and in these moments, Welcome to Raccoon City truly shines. The young cast all throw themselves into their roles, particularly Scodelario and Hopper who are both great, and if the movie had been 90 minutes of this, we’d be looking at a minor classic. As it is, we’ll just have to make do with half of a great Resident Evil movie.
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City does a great job in taking everything that made the games so terrifying – the jump scares, the body horror, the betrayals, the hideous army of the undead – and if the sequel suggested by post credits scene comes to pass, we could be looking at something very special indeed.