Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City Review

Showing your knowledge of a subject can go a couple of ways.

The first way has you dropping in some tasty morsels whist displaying an overall understanding of what you’re dealing with.

Then there’s the second way, which has you completely blowing your load as you clearly try too hard.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City way is the latter. A not so bloody mess. Director Johannes Roberts clearly has some reverence for the property, including plenty that those of us who have followed the franchise for years should have found really cool. It’s a shame that these easter eggs become lost within a narrative mess that tries to do far too many things.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Melding the first two games doesn’t work on a fundamental level. Far too many characters and situations to introduce correctly. It also completely ignored RE3 and Nemesis. The original trilogy set in Raccoon City takes place over two months. Cramming it all into a very limited timeframe with plenty of overlap doesn’t work. The incidents across the Spencer Mansion and Raccoon Police Department are sprawling adventures defined by their environments; stories that need and deserve their own films, not less than forty minutes each.

The casting is best described as a mixed bag. I LOVE the casting of Chris Redfield, with Robbie Amell capturing that Alpha Team Member feel well. He isn’t punching boulders just yet but he fills out the green vest nicely. Kaya Scodelario as Claire Redfield is the only other character that I got on with. If you’re going to play around with the setting and timeline, concentrating on these two would have been a far better choice.

Everyone else is either overly hammy, dull, or miscast. Tom Hooper’s Albert Wesker is two of those!

It’s very frustrating as certain aspects show so much promise. One sequence in the mansion in particular left me hankering for more, but even that has no time to breathe. The conclusion is RE in the best and worst ways. It’s all well and good including important touch points, but none of it feels earned.

WTRC will make for decent enough late night fodder. The Redfield’s are great, which is enough to put it above possibly all the previous RE films. But it’s a wasted opportunity. If they had concentrated on telling one great story, perhaps they would have got the chance to make more.