107 min | R | November 24, 2021 | Screen Gems
A pharmaceutical company poisons a dying town, and the corpses do not stay down. Two cops and a handful of franchise heroes spend one night trying to get out of Raccoon City alive. The game knew exactly what it was. The movie keeps forgetting.
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City reboots the long-running game adaptation by going back to the original 1998 source. Umbrella Corporation has hollowed out a midwestern company town, and the water supply is doing terrible things to the people who drink it. The film splits its attention between the Spencer Mansion and the Raccoon City Police Department, the two settings the early games made famous. It is built as fan service for people who know what a herb does and what a save room sounds like. The result is a horror movie more interested in recreating screenshots than in scaring anyone.
Kaya Scodelario plays Claire Redfield as a returning runaway with a grudge against Umbrella, and she gives the film its only real spine. Robbie Amell plays her brother Chris with a stiffness that never loosens. Hannah John-Kamen plays Jill Valentine and gets stranded in the mansion plot with almost nothing to do. Tom Hopper plays Albert Wesker as a man whose loyalties shift on a schedule the script never earns. Neal McDonough turns the few minutes he has as William Birkin into the most committed work in the cast, all clenched menace and corporate rot. Donal Logue plays Chief Irons broad and loud and lands nowhere.
Johannes Roberts writes and directs, and his instinct is to drown the frame in darkness and let strobing emergency lights do the staging. The mansion scenes are lit so dimly that the action dissolves into noise. The editing cuts away from the monsters at the moment they should land, which kills the dread the production design works to build. Roberts stages individual images straight from the games, the dog through the window and the licker on the ceiling, but he cannot connect them into momentum. The score leans on synth stings that announce scares before they arrive.
The film is two movies stitched together at the seams, and the stitching shows. The mansion half wants to be slow gothic horror and the police station half wants to be a survival shooter. Roberts honors the games as a checklist and forgets they were paced as an experience. There is a version of this that trusts atmosphere over fan recognition. This one points at the things you remember and waits for you to clap.