Ada Wong: The Resident Evil Character in the Movies

Ada Wong is a character who appears in two of the live action Resident Evil films, played by Li Bingbing and then by Lily Gao. She comes from the Capcom games (searches for her usually point to Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 6), and the page on Resident Evil games vs movies compares those games with the films.

Her first film appearance is Resident Evil: Retribution (2012), directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, where Li Bingbing is billed fifth. Her second is Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021), directed by Johannes Roberts, where Lily Gao is billed eighth. The two films belong to different runs. Retribution is the fifth film of Anderson's saga with Milla Jovovich as Alice, while Welcome to Raccoon City has a new cast and a new director, so the two Adas are not the same take on the character.

The credits list her only as Ada Wong, with no alternate names. The Japanese animated films get a passing mention at most, since this profile follows the live action movies.

Ada Wong is tied most closely to Albert Wesker in both films, with Leon Kennedy and Alice as the other names around her. In Retribution she is introduced as a former agent of Wesker, who is played there by Shawn Roberts. In Welcome to Raccoon City the roles are reversed in a small way: Tom Hopper's Wesker wakes blind in a body bag, and Lily Gao's Ada is the woman who hands him sunglasses and gives her name. For more on him, see Albert Wesker.

Leon S. Kennedy is the second name that matters. In Retribution, Johann Urb's Leon leads the rescue team sent to get Alice out of the Umbrella base, and Ada belongs to the same stretch of the story. In Welcome to Raccoon City, Avan Jogia plays Leon as a rookie officer on his first shift, and Ada only appears in the closing scene, after the survivors have escaped. You can read more on Leon Kennedy.

Alice, the lead of the Anderson films, is the person Ada meets after the escape from the cell. Umbrella is the shared enemy in both films, and Raccoon City is the setting of Welcome to Raccoon City.

In my opinion, Ada's best film moment is also her shortest: the closing scene of Welcome to Raccoon City. A blinded Wesker wakes in a body bag, a woman hands him sunglasses, and she says her name. It could be argued that this is one of the more efficient character introductions in the franchise, since the audience needs no setup beyond the name. The 107 minute film spends its time on Claire, Leon and the Birkin family, and then closes on a single scene with a new face.

Her Retribution scenes work for a different reason. Perhaps the strongest part of her role is that she arrives in the middle of a very crowded film. Alice has just escaped a cell in an underwater base, Wesker is talking from a screen, and Leon's team is on the way. Ada is introduced as a former agent of Wesker, someone Alice meets right after leaving the cell block, and that gives the story a quick reason to keep moving.

That being said, the films give Ada little room. Neither has an extended story of her own: she is one figure among many in a busy Retribution, and a single scene in Welcome to Raccoon City. If you want to see how the films stack up overall, see Resident Evil movies ranked.