by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $6.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Kaya Scodelario, Avan Jogia, Hannah John-Kamen, Neal McDonough, Robbie Amell, Tom Hopper
Intro:
... several Jills short of a sandwich ...
After nearly fifteen years of Paul W. S. Anderson mangling such a beloved video game franchise on the big screen, the prospect of a hard reboot sounds promising. Maybe audiences will actually get to see the characters from the games, and not just have them guest-star in The Alice Show, and bring what makes these games so fun to the foreground.
So, let’s see what happens when you hand this property to the director of the 47 Metres Down films, and with Paul W. S. Anderson still attached to the production, albeit in a producing role.
Between the utterly apathetic writing and the limp performances, it’s pretty difficult to care about the main characters. Whether it’s the rookie cop, who doesn’t really know why he’s a cop in the first place with Avan Jogia as Leon S. Kennedy, the badass by default in Hannah John-Kamen’s Jill Valentine, or one of the most half-hearted villains of the year in Neal McDonough’s William Birkin, the whole ‘uncovering a mass pharmaceutical conspiracy’ angle of the story just doesn’t register with the timely and rather heartbreaking tone that it’s set up with. It’s a town being secretly poisoned by a sinister corporation that want to scrub away their actions; Dark Waters could make that terrifying, so why can’t this?
Well, maybe it’s because writer/director Johannes Roberts’ approach to scares is as desperate as the mainstream can get. This is the kind of film that thinks flicking the lights on and off is enough to give its audience chills. Not only that, but he seems to be making composer Mark Korven and the sound design team do all the work for him, as the film’s tensest moments (again, only by default) consist of big, booming jump scares stacked on top of each other. It’s so insistent on startling its audience rather than actually scaring them, you’d think it was an adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s.
As a result of Roberts’ wonky direction, there is little to no atmosphere to be found. The story is backed by a ticking clock to when the titular city will be wiped off the map, and yet both the narrative and the characters within it could not be more lackadaisical on-screen. The town conspiracy, the townspeople slowly wasting away into biological weaponry, the familial frictions between the Redfields; for a film about a zombie apocalypse, it feels like the stakes could not be lower, based on how much impact they make.
Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City is several Jills short of a sandwich. Yeah, it’s a mild improvement over the Paul W. S. Anderson films (and even over Roberts’ 47 Metres Down) but not only are those embarrassingly low bars to clear, it’s still not enough of a boost to make this entertaining on its own terms.
