Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City: Movie Review

Loosely based on the original video game, "Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City" worked when it tried to fully embrace its video gaming roots but spectacularly fails when it tried to deviate from it. Audiences will enjoy the first half and will hate its second half where the film devolves into its old action-centric ways.

Once the booming home of pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corporation, Raccoon City is now a dying Midwestern town as the company has decided to leave the town for good. Those in town are a skeletal team tasked to complete the shutdown and residents who are too poor to leave. Claire Redfield (Kaye Scodelario) is a former resident of the town and is coming home decades after she left it. She wants to find her brother Chris Redfield (Robbie Amell) and convince him that something sinister is happening within Raccoon City and the Umbrella Corporation is behind this evil. Can she reach Chris before its too late?

Seeing this film's trailer a few months back, "Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City" gave us mixed feelings. The film is rebooting a franchise which never really exceled in terms of its quality and never really entertained us even with its action-focused design. Strikingly, this new iteration looked like it was going to be based on the video game's original story even though the characters didn't look anything like the characters that we knew off. Weird. Unsurprsingly then that the final result was a mish-mash of old and new which never really gelled well together. For us, the film showed great potential in its first half when it had less action and focused more on the mysteries within Raccoon City. The sequences with the undead, while weren't particularly scary, at least had some inkling of tension within them. But once they started shooting off their guns, the film suddenly transformed into an all-out and senseless action fest. The execution in this part wasn't really satisfying and most segments came off as B-movie fare. The second half also had this rushed feeling to it and in fact, the film never explained anything literally. Overall, "Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City" had a chance to reboot this franchise to new heights but instead goes back to its sordid roots. Are we excited for more films? To be honest, no.

Rating: 1 and a half reels

Why you should watch it:

- if you loved the past "Resident Evil" films then the action here should at least feel the same as before

- the first half showed the film's lost potential to be awesome

Why you shouldn't watch it:

- forgot to explain anything at all

- became a B-movie action affair in its second half