In practice, Johannes Roberts’ Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (an awful after-colon title if there ever was one) plays a lot like what would happen if, one day, Sony gave up the ghost and bequeathed their properties — but not their budgets — to a studio like The Asylum, and also if every single person at the said studio decided, suddenly, that they had to do their absolute prestige-best in order to not fuck up the property. It’s actually kind of amazing that this wasn’t farmed off to VOD platforms, but I guess that’s what happens when you have name-brand recognition among a whole lot of consumers, each of whom is willing to shell out cash and spend time to see their favorite moments from the long-lasting video game series echoed back at them but without the key elements of “interactivity” or “fun.” If you were to watch a Twitch stream of a game you’ve already played, while totally alone in a darkened room, without any commentary or presence whatsoever from the player, well, I imagine the experience would be a lot like this one — tedious, baffling, and just sort of boring. This is all pretty astonishing for me to say, given that Roberts made two wonderfully campy genre movies in the last decade in the form of the 47 Meters Down franchise, the second of which starred Sly Stallone’s daughter going up against zombie sharks. If anyone should have nailed the tone of a Resident Evil adaptation, which vacillates between goofy action and self-serious horror like a Drinking Duck toy, it probably would have been him. But it’s in the nature of video game adaptation to fail, as they’re trying to do the wrong things.
Anyhow, Welcome to Raccoon City smashes together a whole bunch of the plot points from the first two or three Resident Evil games, and practically begs you to point at the screen and shout “Hey! I remember that!” with knowing joy akin a long-term amnesiac looking through a book of family photos and finding that one picture from Disney World, taken eons ago, that finally gets the gears turning. Do you remember how Claire Redfield (Kaya Scolodero) arrives in Raccoon City — the company town of the infamous chemical corp Umbrella, who are appropriately nefarious and vague in that classical Omni Consumer Products way — in II, and the subsequent car accident that follows? Pretty creepy, right? Well, you’ll get to experience it all over again on the big screen, along with the escapades of rookie cop Leon Kennedy (Avan Jogia), as well as watch a mash-up of the first game, where cop Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen), secret-hoarding and Palm Pilot-sporting goof Wesker (Tom Hopper) and Claire’s brother Chris (Robbie Amell) investigate reports of a murder at a mansion only to find out that zombies have taken over the building. Shit’s bad in Raccoon, as well, as the outbreak isn’t just limited to the mansion: the entire town, except for the police force, have been infected with the T-Virus, a bioweapon created by evil scientist William Birkin (Neal McDonaugh, whose presence in a video game movie should be cause for concern after the one-two punch of Street Fighter: The Legend of Shun-Chi and this). So, lots of mutants, lots of people getting bitten in dark places, plenty of CGI blood and a few practical effects, and a briefly fun performance from Donal Logue, who shows up for a stretch to remind us what goofballery looks like in its purest form.
The cast does their CW-level best with the material, but they’re as beholden to the convention of video game narrative adaptations as Roberts is, such as narrating their interactions with items — much like the stimulus-response feedback that one gets in a clue-finding section of their playthrough to reward interaction as well as to fill dead air — or trying their best to replicate the kind of zombie-fight shit that happens when a walker gets close to the player character in-game. What’s not particularly great is how the movie is filmed and how its plot is structured, First, Roberts’ film is shrouded in darkness, much like the games, but there’s less consideration on blocking and point of light, given that they don’t need to act as subliminal guideposts for the player, and it makes the action ugly and often hard-to-follow. Second, there’s just way, way too much happening here for the characters to be this anonymous and bland, and unless you’re familiar with the games, you’ll have no clue what the hell is going on here, in a way that makes the entire enterprise incoherent. It’s easy to forget that the worst RE games are the ensemble ones and that the peak entry of the game series — the 2019 remake of II, at least in my opinion (look, I know you want me to say IV or VII or something, but II‘s a great game) — wisely separated its characters into two completely different campaigns which were unbroken narratives in their own right (despite some points of mid-plot connection). It also refuses, due to what I imagine are for budgetary reasons, to go-whole hog into the kind of batshit insanity that makes these games memorable until the last fifteen or so minutes, by which point most folks will have tuned out. Be sure to stay for that horrific post-credits sequence, though. A pair of sunglasses has never had a better origin story.
It’s interesting, though: I’m working towards a theory that the best video game movies are the ones that tend to stray away from recapturing the glory days of their console-or-PC bound classics, and instead push forward with their own bizarre interpretations of the games as new cinematic narratives. This, I think, is one of the reasons that the Resident Evil series, when it was in the hands of Paul W.S. Anderson, remained vaguely must-see action cinema (and has its own legion of devoted cineastes to advocate for it online) for the duration of its near-twenty-year run on screens. Part of that may be that studios weren’t afraid of bad press from sizable populations of nerds when that series took off, and a lot of the things that the games may have been considered unadaptable for a mass audience, at least in practice. Filmmakers had to focus on making the movies work as movies rather than be slavish tributes to “iconic” franchises, which had its own pitfalls when, say, you were trying to make Street Fighter into Capcom’s Star Wars, but, again, that’s significantly more interesting than whatever the hell this movie is trying to do. But trying to recapture what makes a game special without any of the interactivity or the sheer visual indulgence possible with video gaming is, ultimately, a fool’s errand, and it goes doubly so for horror gaming, where jump scares can hit different because it is, after all, happening to an extension to yourself. Try getting that adrenaline bump from Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. I don’t know if it’s possible.