Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City review

I've never played the Resident Evil games. I have watched friends play them though, and watched online reviews and playthroughs, so I do know a little about the games and characters. Enough at least to understand why fans of the games could easily hate this movie: the characters in this movie do not look or act anything like the characters in the games. Sure, they got the clothes right, but appearances and personalities just do not match what I have seen from the games.

Now it's always going to be hard to find actors who are perfect matches for videogame characters. And I expect the creators of the film clearly wanted to add a bit more racial diversity to the cast; the original games are Japanese takes on old American horror movies, and are themselves quite old to boot, so it's not surprising that the characters are predominantly caucasian, and I understand why there would be a desire to change that slightly for the film. I appreciate diverse casts, but I'm not a fan of race-swapping existing characters, so I'm pretty much on the fence on this issue - at least in this instance.

What I will say is that, because I don't have a strong attachment to the games myself, it didn't bother me too much that the characters were not translated from the games very faithfully. What bothered me more was that none of the characters were very interesting or likeable, or really had all that much chance to exhibit very much personality.

Well, it would have bothered me if I had gone in actually expecting, or even just hoping for, a good movie. But I didn't, not really. I watched this in the cinema just because I was tired of big-budget creatively-lacking sequels/reboots/remakes and other nostalgia cash-grabs that took themselves too seriously; the idea of a relatively low-budget creatively-lacking sequel/reboot/remake nostalgia cash-grab legitimately felt like a breath of fresh air. A mediocre zombie-flick that I had very little emotional investment in but that would probably have decent action and effects sounded preferable to yet another "cinematic universe" superhero movie. I'm not saying that kind of thing is bad or anything, I'm a just a little tired of them and want some low-investment stand-alone popcorn flicks.

I appologise for rambling on. The point I'm trying to make is that I went in to this movie expecting a generic zombie flick, and that's pretty much what I got. And, as far as I could tell at least, it isn't one of those zombie movies that explores the human condition, or serves as a metaphor for something, or tries a creative new twist on the genre, or is full of self-aware tongue-in-cheek humor; it's a pretty basic zombie flick. But it is a reasonably fun one. Well, I enjoyed it at least.

It helped that I rather like so many of the cast members. I really quite like Neal McDonough, and I think he did a great job through most of Racoon City - though I felt the writing let him down in the last few scenes. For most of the run-time though he was probably my favourite character. I remember being pleasantly surprised by Donal Logue in Life, I was enjoying him in this one and wish he had a little more screen-time. Hannah John-Kamen was a lot of fun in Killjoys, it's a real shame she had so little to do here. Kaya Scodelario was a little "one-note" in the previous couple of movies I'd seen her in, and that didn't change in this one. Still, I liked her in Crawl and I felt her character here was probably closer to the game version than any of the others, so I guess that "one note" was arguably the correct one. I wasn't really familiar with anyone else in the cast, and while they all did decent jobs, the only one who really left any sort of an impression was probably Tom Hopper; despite this movie's version of Wesker having ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in common with the game version, he was at least given the opportunity to display a little bit of emotional range.

To be fair the film had it's moments. I thought it did a pretty good job of establishing the atmosphere and building up to the zombie infection. It brought a bit of creativity to the action scenes, switching up the pace and style from one to the next, so I never thought it felt repetitive or started to drag on. A couple of scenes got some pretty good laughs out of me too. Even if the film wasn't very true to the games, it was still more-or-less built on them, using places, names, and plot devices from the original series. It even had a couple of secret doors that had to be opened in silly ways - an absolute cornerstone of the games.


I'll give it a 6/10. It's serviceable for casual viewing, as long as you're not precious about the games. If you are - which I can appreciate as that's how I feel about a lot of things - then yeah, you might be better off trying to forget this one exists.




#####SPOILER WARNING##### The scene with the zombie on fire was the absolute highlight for me, and worth the price of admission on it's own. Like, I've never seen someone so on fire, walking in such a relaxed and casual way - the dude was not in a hurry! And the police chief's reaction to seeing a guy on fire? Shoot him in the head! It totally cracked me up. Bear in mind this is the very start of the zombie infection, these characters have not seen a zombie yet; as far as they know it's just a dude on fire! You'd expect them to run for an extinguisher, but no! HEADSHOT! OK, to be fair it's possible that the police chief knew about the zombies as he does seem to know more than everyone else about the town, but we don't exactly know that at the time (and even later it's a little ambiguous), so it's pretty unexpcted when it happens.