Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)

It's a shame, it really is. You can tell that someone involved in making this genuinely cares about the source material. There are moments scattered across Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City where the game DNA shines through clearly enough that you can almost feel the affection behind them. The Spencer Mansion. The police station. The atmosphere of dread in those familiar corridors. When the film leans into that stuff, it works. Not brilliantly, but it works. And for a franchise that spent the better part of two decades drifting further and further away from what made the games worth caring about, even a partial return to form felt like something worth getting excited about.

Which makes the rest of it all the more frustrating.

This is clearly a film pulling itself in two directions at once, and it never manages to reconcile them. On one hand, there's a genuine attempt to honour the games, to recreate specific moments and settings that fans will recognise, to get back to the survival horror roots that the Milla Jovovich era largely abandoned. On the other hand, there's an equally obvious attempt to court a broader audience by layering on extra characters, extra subplots, extra noise, all of it feeling bolted on rather than built in. The result is a film that satisfies neither camp particularly well.

The new material is, bluntly, awful. It introduces elements that feel like they've wandered in from a completely different film, the kind of generic horror-action filler that clogs up the running time without adding tension, character or story. Every time the film finds a groove by leaning into what made the games unsettling, it trips over one of these additions and loses whatever momentum it had built. It's a structural problem more than anything else. You can patch over weak dialogue or dodgy CGI, but you can't easily fix a script that doesn't know what it wants to be.

There's a version of this film I'd genuinely have loved. Tight, faithful, atmospheric, willing to be slow and creepy rather than loud and busy. The bones of it are in here somewhere. When the film echoes those early game environments, when it captures even a fraction of that claustrophobic dread, you get a glimpse of what could have been. I think of how poorly the franchise had been served before this, and I reviewed Resident Evil: Retribution (2012) a while back, a film so utterly divorced from anything resembling the source material that it barely qualifies as the same property. At least here there's intent. At least here someone is trying.

But trying only gets you so far. Good intentions don't paper over a film that's undermined at every turn by its own excess. The performances range from passable to forgettable, the pacing lurches around without confidence, and the horror, when it arrives, rarely lands with the weight it needs to. There's not enough trust in the audience to sit with the quiet, the dark, the creeping dread. Instead it reaches for spectacle it hasn't earned.

One and a half stars, and honestly the half star is for the moments that worked, few as they were. I wanted to like this considerably more than I did, and that disappointment is its own kind of sting. There's a decent, maybe even good, Resident Evil film hiding somewhere inside this mess. Somebody just needs to find the courage to actually make it.

Rating: ★½  | Year: 2021  | Watched: 2025-07-02

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