Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario) returns to her hometown to reconnect with her brother Chris (Robbie Amell) and to try and prove that the pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corporation have been poisoning the people of Raccoon City for years.

I have never played any of the Resident Evil games and I watched all the Milla Jovovich Resident Evil films for the first time back in 2017 (I was going to say it was a few years ago but then it turned out to be five! What is time? etc) so going into Welcome to Raccoon City I didn’t really have any preconceptions of what this film and its characters should be.

I think that was perhaps a blessing and a curse. A blessing as I can’t get mad at any changes the film may have made from the games but also a curse as I feel like I learnt so little about these characters, their personalities or the various relationship dynamics, that I couldn’t really care about them. The way character names were dropped it felt like the filmmakers were relying on viewers to already have knowledge of the characters and story from the games and didn’t really do any proper world or character-building to make you care if you were someone going into this film blind.

Everything about Welcome to Raccoon City is pretty generic but there are a few moments that are generally stylistically interesting. Most of them come from when Chris is under attack by these diseased and zombie-like people. Often the only light source is the flash from his gun or from a flickering lighter and then it becomes a point of view shot with his lighter held out in front of him and the creatures getting closer every time the flame goes out.

The dialogue is kind of awful and the cast does the best with what they’re given. Kaya Scodelario’s Claire is a highlight but that does mean that whenever the film is away from her it starts to drag again. The middle chunk of the film when the action gets going is pretty decent but it feels like it takes too much time to get to that point and then the ending is very rushed.

Overall Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City manages to be a frustrating endeavour. There’s few scares and what level of threat is there is diminished when you realise you don’t care about any of the characters chances of survival. 2/5.