“Live in Raccoon City? No way,” a truck driver grunts in Johannes Roberts’s “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City,” an inevitable reboot of the long-running, high-grossing franchise based on a video game.
This is familiar lore to fans of the two-dozen-plus first-person shooter games and six previous films. But by leaping back to 1998, Roberts’s origin tale accomplishes two things: it excuses the absence of longtime star Milla Jovovich and it embraces oh-so-trendy ’90s nostalgia.
There’s delight in cinematographer Maxime Alexandre and editor Dev Singh’s slow-building visual gags, particularly a bit when Avan Jogia’s slacker cop dozes at his desk while a speeding tanker careens outside the station, explodes in a fireball, and ejects a zombie-turned-tiki-torch who finally disrupts his nap.