Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City arrives as a reboot with the solemn duty of adapting the first two games and the additional duty of reminding us that a Midwestern ghost town can still smell of corporate malfeasance. Johannes Roberts stages the Spencer Mansion and the police station with affection for fixed camera angles and rain-slicked dread. The film is a zombie picture first and a social text a distant fourth. Its diverse casting, including Avan Jogia as Leon and Hannah John-Kamen as Jill, proceeds without editorial comment, which is either confidence or indifference. Claire and Jill handle firearms and exposition with competence, but the film has no gender-politics seminar to deliver. Umbrella remains a pharmaceutical company that experiments on children and abandons a city, yet the critique stops at the familiar threshold of horror-villain corporate malfeasance. There is no systemic argument, just a laboratory full of bad decisions and a rocket launcher.

The film does not engage in racial commentary, climate anxiety, body positivity, neurodivergence, or historical revisionism. Its conspiracy warnings are plot mechanics, not sermons. The result is a modest genre exercise that treats progressive sensibilities as casting decisions and nothing more. This is not a criticism; it is a classification. The cultural awareness on display is largely administrative. Even the corporate villainy is standard issue: Umbrella is bad because it ruins a town and makes monsters, not because it represents an economic order. The film has no interest in lecturing us about any of this, and its restraint is almost restful.

As a reboot, it carries the burden of fan service, and it bears that burden with a shrug. The action is competent, the atmosphere is damp, and the dialogue exists to move people toward the next locked door. It is the kind of picture that casts a diverse ensemble and then asks them to run from zombies, which is a perfectly reasonable use of a diverse ensemble. For those keeping a ledger of cultural markers, the entries are sparse and the margins are wide. The film wants to be a faithful adaptation, not a sermon, and on that modest point it succeeds.