Then came 2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City . Directed by Johannes Roberts ( 47 Meters Down ), this reboot made a bold promise: We are going back to the 90s. We are going back to the game.
The highlight? The Licker.
The film is drenched in dark, atmospheric dread, but it is also punctuated by moments of absurd comedy. A recurring gag involves Leon eating a gas station hot dog that gets progressively more contaminated. Another scene has a character trying to push a heavy bookshelf over a window while a zombie moans politely outside. Resident Evil- Welcome to Raccoon City
Furthermore, the budget constraints are visible. The city-wide outbreak feels small. We see maybe two blocks of Raccoon City. The Orphanage (a deep pull from Resident Evil 2 ) is utilized well, but the climactic train escape lacks the scale of "a city of 100,000 dying." Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is not a masterpiece. It is a rough, jagged, lovingly crafted piece of fan-service that sometimes trips over its own ambition. It lacks the slick polish of the Resident Evil remakes and the blockbuster budget of the Anderson films. Then came 2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City
In the sprawling, CGI-laden shadow of Paul W.S. Anderson’s six-film franchise—a run that turned Milla Jovovich into a super-powered goddess and zombies into bullet-points on an action movie checklist—fans of Capcom’s seminal survival horror series had long since given up hope of seeing a faithful adaptation. For two decades, Hollywood treated Resident Evil as a vehicle for slow-motion gun-fu and mono-syllabic villains. The Spencer Mansion, the crimson heads, the oppressive dread of running out of ink ribbons—these were sacrificed for explosion budgets. The highlight