'Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City' (2021) REview: A Bland and Bungled Return to Raccoon City
By Dan Bremner - September 16, 2026
After Paul W.S. Anderson's abysmal Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, there was nowhere but up for the Resident Evil film franchise. I may have been a bit too optimistic, this reboot of the series is certainly more faithful and arguably better than most of the Anderson joints, but it is far, far from a good film. Unlike Anderson's outings, Welcome to Raccoon City does at least retain the basic plot, characters and locations from the films, but execution from Johannes Roberts is unfortunately, a whole other matter.
Messily mashing together the first two games in the franchise is in theory a smart idea, as both those stories more or less take place at the same time. We spend most of the film in Raccoon City as the zombie apocalypse is starting to take off and the other half in the Spencer mansion as the Raccoon City police department attempts to get to the bottom of things before the city is wiped out.
I remember my biggest fear from the trailers came true very early on. This whole thing feels and looks like a glorified fan film with a larger budget, things feel cheap, tacky and very unpolished. Then the cast truly do feel like the blandest bunch of CW Channel young adults casted based on the fact they are attractive but carry absolutely no screen presence or charisma.
Robbie Amell as Chris Redfield is particularly a big nothing of an actor based on his role here along with Tom Hopper as Albert Wesker. They both look so generic and similar I was honestly getting confused by who was who throughout. They both carry that same incredibly forgettable young adult actor vibe for TV and it sticks out like a sore thumb. At least Kaya Scodelario, an actress who deserves a much better career than the one she's stuck with seems to have put in something resembling a performance, but is bogged down with terrible material to work with. She truly is the only actor in this film that seems to know what she's doing while every other lead feels like a braindead model thrown a script without any semblance of acting skills.
I'm not sure what the creative team's issue with Leon is as a character, but they clearly do not like him. I can only assume that Johannes Roberts’s wife left him for a cardboard cut-out of Leon and he's held a grudge since. Avan Jogia may be a good actor, but what they do with his character is absolutely painful. He is basically Sweet Dee from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, just constantly shit on and the punchline to every joke for no reason at all. I was surprised that no one said "Shut up, bird" or "You goddamn bitch" to him.
Roberts clearly has no idea what he's doing as a director or writer. While some of the settings and moments are faithful to the original games, his framing and eye for action is pretty pathetic. Some moments look quite nice, capturing the vibe and iconography of the games, but then others look poorly filmed with camera work straight out of a TV show. One extended take involving Journey's "Any Way You Want It" was stunningly awful and badly shot.
There are bizarre moments of confused and deeply unfunny comedy that come out of nowhere with totally out of place music that has no business being here. There are some truly head-scratching needle-drops here that are never any less than bizarre. Resident Evil has never been one for good writing (They are B-movies in video-game form), but some of the infamous lines from the games are awkwardly shoehorned to pander to fans in cringe worthy fashion.
It was hard to pick out particular lines of dialogue too, as every other word seemed to be "Fuck", it was incredibly juvenile and lost its impact almost instantly. I've genuinely never heard this much use of the word fuck in film or TV in as long as I can remember, characters would throw it in 10-20 times in the space of one 2 minute conversation frequently. I don't know what they were thinking.
I'm trying to think of positives, but there honestly is very little. Neal McDonough seems to be having fun as the villain hamming it up to a fun degree before being turned into a heinous CGI abomination by the end. Although the general special effects were cheap and felt unpolished, there were some choice moments of practical gore and violence that were very welcome. The main positive is that this feels like a masterpiece compared to The Final Chapter, and at the very least, it is a step in the right direction.
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is better than some of the previous Evil adaptations but is still quite bad. Stuck with a cast of bland CW level actors, poor special effects, forgettable action, a truly awful script and a messy, unfocused plot that mashes together the first two games to messy effect. There was no sequel.
Come back for more Resident Evil content as we count down to Zach Cregger's 'Resident Evil' - Releasing in cinemas on September 19, 2026.
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Dan Bremner
Writer
Dan is a writer from Guildford with a love for all things genre, schlocky, and thoroughly '80s, and a part-time philanthropist.
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