‘Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City’ (2021)


I love zombie movies (even the bad ones, especially the bad ones sometimes…) and I have a particular soft spot for the ‘Resident Evil’ movies. I’ve yet to watch a decent one but they’ve all got a lot of heart and they’re all a lot of fun to watch. I’ve never really played the games though… I had a go at ‘Resident Evil 2’, way back in the day but never made it out of the initial alleyway, let along into the police station. Maybe if I’d seen ‘Welcome to Raccoon City’ first, I might have stood a better chance…

Raccoon City, which was once a booming home of pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corporation, is now a dying Midwestern town. The company's exodus  left the city a wasteland... with great evil brewing beneath the surface. When that evil is unleashed, a group of survivors must work together to uncover the truth behind Umbrella and make it through the night.

I’m not the world’s biggest ‘Resident Evil’ fan but if there’s a new film to be watched then you can bet that I’ll be watching it sooner rather than later. And on the whole, I’m glad that I took a little time for myself and gave ‘Welcome to Raccoon City’ a go. It’s a more than serviceable film about the ‘zombification’ of a small town and various people’s fights to get out of said town before the Umbrella Corporation blow it up. There are more than enough zombies to go round and they also provide a couple of genuinely creepy moments as these zombies will do anything to get their teeth into human flesh. There are moments where the camera directs your eye elsewhere but you can see zombies up to stuff out of the corner of your eye and you know something’s about to happen… I love this approach, it really worked for me. Add in some gun toting cops and you’ve got yourself a little slice of ‘survival horror’ that works very well for the most part.

I say, ‘for the most part’…

Is it possible for a movie to be ‘too true’ to its source material? Normally, I’d say no but here though, I’d say that it is; especially when characters are clearly being shepherded in order to make use of features, like secret tunnels, that you would find in the games. A nice head of tension is built up and then it vanishes, at precisely the wrong time, just so we can see that the film makers are being true to the source (as it were). I get why it’s done but at the same time, maybe it didn’t need to be done quite so much? It was a decent movie up to that point. And as far as giant ‘G-Virus Infected’ creatures go, if you’re going to have them big then you really need to make sure that they don’t look too cartoonish, not like this one did.

I actually had a lot of fun with ‘Welcome to Raccoon City’ but those admittedly small but important moments really made a difference and not in a good way. If you like zombie films then you will find something here to enjoy, likewise if you’re a ‘Resident Evil’ fan. It had the potential to be a lot better than it eventually was though… 

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