Review of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021) by Calvincrack — 26 Nov 2021

What went wrong here….

Not enough budget to realize this story. Poor script with no character development. Badly directed. The pacing was weird…. It was boring for the first half with way too much setup, then they crammed the mansion incident and police station all into the back half of the film and neither was fully satisfying. It was just amateurish from start to finish. I have a lot of bad things to say about this movie. I was open to a campy good time but what we have here is not even interesting. The original Resident Evil movie, while frustratingly nothing like RE1 the game, is a much better film. Something that sticks out in my recollection was the poor characterization of Leon. Leon was always portrayed as a stars in the eyes rookie but noble and heroic. Here he is portrayed as an imbecile with frayed nerves and little self confidence. Not sure why this choice was made. You can still have the character arc from inexperienced rookie to seasoned bad ass without having the character start out this weak. This feels like a fan project…but fans would never do this; fans would do a more literal retelling of the stories and include a character like Ada Wong who adds a lot of intrigue to the story. And not cut everything creepy to do with Chief Irons. And not cut Tyrant and Mr. X. And the Lab sections of both games. They basically cut all the interesting stuff. This is a really really bad movie and it sucks because we’re probably not gonna see them try this again. Thank god for Resident Evil 2 Remake that shows us how this sort of thing can be done right. In fact I’ll go play it right now. Skip this movie, even for fans.