Sequel degradation
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City
Cast: Kaya Scodelario,
Robbie Amell Director: Johannes Roberts
Duration: 1 h 47 m Available: In theatres
With its lack of meaningful plot and a roster of characters with lovely hair, pretty faces and forgettable personalities, Welcome to Raccoon City plays more like an extended cut of a shampoo commercial than the latest chapter in a long-running action-horror franchise. Resident Evil: Now with 100 per cent less Jovovich!
The series began in 2002, and is based on the wildly popular video game series from 1996. There have been eight chapters including the original, with sequels subtitled Apocalypse, Extinction, Back in Training, Afterlife, Retribution, City Under Siege and The Final Chapter. (Also, kudos if you knew there were only six and were able to pick out the titles I borrowed from the Police Academy franchise.)
Raccoon City marks the inevitable reboot, which is another way of saying that almost no one involved in the original films is part of this one. Writer/director Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down) based his screenplay on elements from the first and second instalments of the game, with most of the action set in 1998.
After a strange, spooky prelude years earlier in the Raccoon City orphanage, the film gets rolling with Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario) hitchhiking back into the town where she grew up. Her brother Chris (Robbie Amell) still lives there and works as a cop, part of a ragtag group of officers that includes Valentine (Hannah John-kamen), Wesker (Tom Hopper), the crusty chief (Donal Logue) and the rookie (Avan Jogia).
Raccoon City is a veritable ghost town, run by an evil pharmaceutical firm that’s been poisoning the drinking water. So it’s hardly a surprise when a zombie outbreak occurs — the municipality even has a warning siren to let people know all hell is about to break loose.
Full disclosure: I’ve never seen even a single instalment of Resident Evil, mostly due to the fact that the studios seldom made them available for critics to review ahead of opening. But based on this chapter, and reverse-calculating the law of diminishing returns, I can confidently suggest that the first Resident Evil was a fine motion picture. But No. 7 might have been better titled Resident Evil: Bottom of the Barrel. ★1/2