Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)

The greatest credit I can give to "Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City" is that it made me appreciate the previous Paul W.S. Anderson films all the more. Sure, those movies had little to do with the games and took far too many liberties, but at least they had some entertainment value behind them. By contrast, this new take on the classic video-game is dead on arrival, with atrociously bad effects, poor performances and a frankly shocking lack of pace or structure. It's a dull, dreary mess where things just sort-of randomly happen for 90 or so minutes with no set-up, buildup or pay-off, and then it just stops. It doesn't even properly end. The movie literally just stops.

I'd give a plot summary, but frankly there's no plot to speak of. I guess it's sort-of about a really sleepy cop (I genuinely feel bad about how tired he is), two cranky siblings and a couple of commandos aimlessly wandering around town... and maybe running into a zombie or two once every 5 or 10 minutes of screentime? Rinse and repeat about a dozen times. That's basically all the plot there is. And I guess they try to talk about the evil Umbrella Corporation a few times and set them up as the big villains... but the company has literally no presence in the film outside of brief pieces of lip-service, so they don't feel like a credible threat.

Pretty much right around the time sleepy cop manages to snooze through an 18 wheeler crashing and exploding literally fifteen feet in front of him... only to be woken up by a gunshot thirty seconds later, I checked out. I knew this was a movie where logic, reason and basic storytelling rules do not apply.

I wasn't surprised to see Johannes Roberts' name listed as the writer/director. The man managed to make two of the dullest, blandest movies I've ever seen with his atrocious "47 Meters Down" duology. And this movie is another big old piece of crap to lump on to his impressively underwhelming filmography.

The only good thing about this movie, and I do mean the only good thing, is that there's a few fun references and callbacks to the games for fans. I was particularly amused by the reference to the infamous "Jill sandwich" meme. Other than a few fun references though, this movie was one of the biggest let-downs of the year.

Ok, I'll also admit a certain shot with a flying cow towards the end made me chuckle, which I think was an intentional laugh... it gave me pleasant flashbacks of seeing "Twister" as a kid. But then again... you shouldn't remind audiences of a better movie during your bad movie.

1 out of 5. Don't even bother.

TedStixon