I Watch Films: Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City

 

Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City

It’s 1998, as the soundtrack insists, and at one point the police chief suggests that they might want to go to Planet Hollywood for the new salad in the neighbouring town, and go to Blockbuster for a film so I guess that's certain. We’re in Raccoon City, once a company town for the Umbrella Corporation, now they’re leaving, too much environmental damages.

Enter Claire Redfield, hitchhiking back to the city to warn her brother of a conspiracy theorists warnings about the city. (She has to explain chatrooms on the internet and the conspiracy film is on a VHS cassette). Chris Redfield (Robbie Amell, last seen by me on The Flash, on a season I've not yet posted about probably) is a cop. The two of them grew up in an orphanage here before something weird happened and she ran away. They’re not on good terms.

Something goes wrong up at the manor and the elite STARS team including Chris, Wesker, Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen, Killjoys, SAS:Red Notice, Ant-Man And The Wasp), a couple of others. At the same time the zombie plague that Umbrella has unleashed leads to Claire, rookie cop Leon Kennedy, and Police Chief Brian Irons (Donal Logue, who keeps turning up as a world-weary cop in things I’ve watched) under siege in the police station.

Raccoon City, the police station and the mansion are all from the Resident Evil video games, maybe the orphanage too, not sure about that. There’s also Neal McDonough (seen in Arrow/Legends Of Tomorrow/The Flash) as the evil scientist, during the part of the film when they make a half-hearted attempt at explaining what’s going on.

The action scenes and effects are mostly functional, with a couple of proper creepy sequences. With a charismatic cast, variety of zombie fighting scenarios, a couple of unsettling monsters and a few broad bits of fun I wanted to like the film, despite it occasionally shifting gears between awkward comedy to incoherent violence to genuinely weird moments in a confusing way.

Watch This: Fun action zombie film, with a few twists
Don’t Watch This: You’d prefer to be in control of the games, or maybe even liked the amnesiac strangeness of the previous sextet of Resident Evil films