Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)
★½ — Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)
The Resident Evil franchise has had a complicated relationship with its source material since Paul W. S. Anderson launched his own film series back in 2002. That run, starring Milla Jovovich, stretched to six instalments and generated considerable box office returns while drifting ever further from the survival horror tone of the original Capcom video games. By the time the Anderson series wrapped up with The Final Chapter in 2016, there was a reasonable appetite among fans for something that might actually feel like the games they remembered. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City positions itself as exactly that, a clean-slate reboot that goes back to the settings, characters and atmosphere of the first two games in the series, Raccoon City and the Spencer Mansion, rather than building on anything from the previous film run.
The film was directed by Johannes Roberts, a British filmmaker perhaps best known for the underwater thriller 47 Metres Down and its sequel. Constantin Film, the German production company that has held the rights to the Resident Evil film franchise for decades, co-produced alongside Screen Gems and Davis Raccoon Films, with the shoot taking place largely in Canada. Roberts wrote the screenplay himself, drawing directly on the events and locations of the 1996 and 1998 games, and was vocal in press about wanting to capture the creeping dread and puzzle-box atmosphere that defined that era of survival horror gaming. It is, on paper at least, a different proposition to the kinetic action spectacles that preceded it. For a sense of how action-horror can either click or clatter around without purpose, it is worth glancing at what we made of Castle Freak, another horror reboot that took a swing at reinventing older material, or indeed Hardcore Henry, which pushed the action genre in a wildly different direction around the same period.
The cast assembled here is a polished but unremarkable ensemble of recognisable faces. Kaya Scodelario leads as Claire Redfield, bringing the kind of assured physicality she has shown in franchise work before. Hannah John-Kamen takes on Jill Valentine, Tom Hopper plays Albert Wesker, Robbie Amell is Chris Redfield, and Avan Jogia appears as Leon S. Kennedy, a character beloved enough by fans that the casting drew considerable scrutiny before release. The film runs at 107 minutes and, to its credit, keeps both the Spencer Mansion and the Raccoon City Police Department as its twin locations, mirroring the split structure that players of the original games will recognise immediately.
Shame really. You can see they're trying to remain loyal to the games on one hand while adding a bunch of extra elements to build out whole different audience. The parts that mirror the games are generally quite good but the new stuff is generally awful.
That tension between fan service and broader commercial ambition is one that plagues reboots of this sort more often than not, and it's hard not to feel a little frustrated when the bones of something decent are buried under choices that feel like they were made by committee. The moments that clearly come straight from the games, the geography, the atmosphere, the odd bit of puzzle logic, do carry a certain charge for anyone who spent time with those titles. But every time the film leans into that, something else pulls it sideways. I've seen similar wobbles in other horror films that can't quite settle on who they're talking to, and it rarely ends well for either audience. A shame, as you say, because the raw material is genuinely there. It just needed someone to trust it a bit more.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 2021 | Watched: 2025-07-02
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021) on YouTube
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