Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Zach Cregger
Starring: Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, Paul Walter Hauser
Following 2021's Welcome to Raccoon City and a short lived 2022 Netflix series, this is the third attempt to reboot the Resident Evil property in just the last half decade. The decision to hand the IP over to Zach Cregger, of Barbarian and Weapons fame, initially seemed odd, as Cregger's previous work in the horror genre is so distinctive that he doesn't seem like the sort of filmmaker who would be happy to play in someone else's sandbox. But Cregger has made this reboot his own. Remove the title and you essentially have a standalone movie, one that thankfully doesn't rely on prior knowledge of either the original video games or the numerous screen adaptations.
I can't speak to Resident Evil's fealty to its specific video game source, but in terms of its structure it's very much influenced by video games in general. Cregger, along with co-writer Shay Hatten, has boiled this down to a simple story of a protagonist who must negotiate various levels on a journey to get from point A to point B.
That protagonist is Bryan (Austin Abrams), a young medical courier who is currently stressed out over the news that his girlfriend (voiced by the director's wife, Sara Paxton, in phone conversations) has discovered she is pregnant. Unable to refuse the double pay on offer, Bryan agrees to transport a piece of unknown cargo to Raccoon City's hospital in the middle of a snowstorm. The weather quickly becomes the least of Bryan's problems, as in a not so subtle COVID allusion, the Umbrella Corporation has accidentally released a deadly virus from a laboratory situated on the top floor of the hospital.
Like the hero of a video game, Bryan must make his way through a series of increasingly difficult challenges in order to make it to the hospital and save the world from contamination. These challenges range from the mundane (there is a running gag about Bryan repeatedly being thwarted by padlocks) to the monstrous, with affected humans and animals turning into a bizarre array of monsters.
There isn't much in the way of originality here, with Cregger pulling heavily from Jon Carpenter's The Thing in a way that almost veers on copyright infringement. When a dog's head splits open like a flowered onion and unleashes tentacles, you wonder if Carpenter will get his lawyers on the phone. The macabre humour owes a lot to '80s horror comedies like Return of the Living Dead and Re-Animator, and there is a clever reconstitution of the "Critter Ball" from the Critters series. Abrams' Bryan is very much a Gen-Z cousin of Bruce Campbell's Ash from the Evil Dead series. Like Evil Dead II, Resident Evil is largely a one-man show, heavily reliant on Abrams' performance to generate both scares and laughs. Co-writer Hatten was one of the writers on John Wick 4, and the finale here sees him rework the climax of that film, replacing armies of hitmen with an array of monstrous ghouls.
But Cregger and Hatten have stirred all these influences into a satisfying brew that harks back to a time when mainstream horror movies weren't afraid to poke fun at themselves. Cregger plays this with tongue firmly in cheek, refusing to give his protagonist the usual "trauma" backstory. Yet even though Bryan is a figure of fun, he's still someone we root for, and knowing relatively little about him makes him the perfect audience cypher, much like the character we might opt to play as in a video game. Abrams does a lot with little here, and while we laugh at and with Bryan we find ourselves genuinely hoping the nebbish makes it out alive.
A 90-minute movie that races from one set-piece to another at breakneck speed, Resident Evil is a major departure from the slow burn style Cregger has become associated with thanks to his two previous genre efforts. I've always maintained that if you can make a comedy you can make a horror movie, as both genres similarly rely heavily on timing and staging. Now that Cregger has established both his horror and comedy credentials, he deploys both disciplines in an organic way here, with sequences that are staged to illicit simultaneous laughs and screams. Cregger hasn't made a gourmet meal here, and there is little to give you food for thought after your screening. Rather this is a grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwich, its sweet and savoury flavours melting together to make for a tasty treat. This is fast food horror, but it's fast food that has been cooked with love.
Resident Evil is in UK/ROI cinemas from September 18th.
