a monster mash
Review: Resident Evil might just be the best gaming adaptation yet
Director Zach Cregger’s clever reboot strikes perfect balance between horror, humor, and over-the-top gore.
Credit:
Sony Pictures
Credit:
Sony Pictures
I was on the fence about going to see the latest Resident Evil reboot to review, given how uninspired the prior reboot attempt in 2021 turned out to be. But director Zach Cregger gave us last year’s phenomenal Weapons, and early word of mouth was extremely positive, so I took a chance. I’m glad I did, because the film is terrific. Cregger’s distinctive sensibility is just what the flagging franchise needed: a truly fresh take on a well-trodden fictional world that blends horror, humor, and some pretty over-the-top gore in just the right ratios. And you don’t need to be a Resident Evil franchise fan to enjoy it.
(Spoilers below, but we’ll give you a heads-up before any major reveals.)
When the first Resident Evil game debuted in 1996, it was an immediate commercial and critical success, spawning several sequel games, comics, novels, and a very lucrative film franchise directed by Paul W.S. Anderson and starring Milla Jovovich. Reviews were mixed, despite the films’ massive box office success. The first reboot, Welcome to Raccoon City (2021), was critically panned and had a disappointing box office, grossing just $42 million globally against its $25 million budget. The studio nixed its plans for a direct sequel, and a 2022 Netflix series was also canceled after a less-than-stellar first season.
Enter Cregger, who hadn’t seen any of the original films when he took on the project but was a huge fan of the games, especially Resident Evil 2. Cregger’s take is not a direct game adaptation, but an original story with original characters set in the same fictional universe. Cregger told the audience at CinemaCon earlier this year that his film would have “no narrative acrobatics, time jumps, or disorienting chapter things,” preferring his audience to be “locked in with a protagonist on a foot journey through a world hell-bent on destroying them.” Nor would it be like Weapons; Cregger’s Resident Evil vision, he said, is closer to Evil Dead II yet still “true to the spirit of the games.”
Cregger set his story in the present day just as the T-virus is spreading throughout Raccoon City. And he opted to make his protagonist a plucky Everyman: a young medical courier named Bryan (Austin Abrams) whose girlfriend Michelle (Sara Paxton) has just told him over the phone that she’s pregnant as he’s dropping an organ off at a hospital.
Bryan makes the ill-fated decision to accept one last courier run to deliver a priority package to the hospital in Raccoon City. It’s snowing heavily, and he’s arguing with Michelle while driving when he hits a woman (Andrea Miltnerova) who wanders suddenly into the road. She’s an Infected (i.e., zombie), of course, but Bryan has no idea. Nor does the local sheriff (Johnno Wilson), who agrees to help Bryan transport her to the hospital.
Things go exactly how you’d expect: The zombie kills the sheriff and comes after a panicked Bryan, who manages to shoot her with the sheriff’s gun—and also accidentally shoots out his own car engine, stranding him. Bryan is forced to take refuge in a local farmhouse, and things just go from bad to worse.
(WARNING: more significant spoilers below. Half the fun of this movie is the element of surprise, so stop now if you haven’t seen the film yet.)
Here be mutant monsters
Sony Pictures
Sony Pictures
Sony Pictures
Sony Pictures
Sony Pictures
It’s a small cast with a single protagonist, so everything hangs on Abrams’ performance, and he knocks it out of the park. Abrams has the kind of expressive face that can navigate a host of conflicting emotions. Case in point: In the farmhouse, he shoots a pair of zombies, but the darn bodies sprout tentacles and reach out to each other. Bryan is frozen in horrified fascination, knowing he should run but unable to look away as a bizarre hybrid zombie forms. From Bryan’s awkward response to the news he’s about to become a father, to his profanity-laced frustration as his situation progressively worsens, to sheer panicked terror, to weary resignation—Abrams hits them all.
Cregger certainly knows his craft; this is an exceptionally well-made film. It’s a simple narrative structure—Bryan must overcome increasingly difficult obstacles to deliver his package in time—but the pacing is tight and never lags. There are a handful of very effective jump scares, especially early on, but Cregger wisely doesn’t overuse them. Ditto for the third-person gameplay point of view the director incorporates throughout to give the viewer a sense of what it’s like to play the game. It could have felt gimmicky, but Cregger weaves those shots seamlessly with the more traditional objective POV.
There is just enough wry humor—think Shaun of the Dead—sprinkled throughout to keep things from getting too grim, often deriving from Bryan’s cluelessness and general lack of skills. (His multiple encounters with stubborn old-fashioned padlocks are a running gag that never plays quite the same twice.) Cregger told The Hollywood Reporter that his first cut of the film had a lot more humor in it—so much so that test audiences thought the film was a little too funny. So Cregger went back and removed most of the jokes, and the movie is better for it. “A little bit of humor goes a long way in a horror movie, and there’s not a single joke I took out of this movie that I miss,” he said.
Surprisingly, zombies, while present, are not the film’s main focus; we get a smorgasbord of monstrous mutant creatures instead, and it’s more effective. That hybrid zombie, for instance, keeps incorporating more and more bodies as it pursues Bryan all the way to Raccoon City until it becomes a giant Amalgamation Monster. We get an obese, hairless, naked man in a sewer whose belly explodes and unleashes a horde of zombie rats, as well as an Infected at the hospital who vomits acid.
Fair warning: Resident Evil’s body horror is not for the squeamish. The gore factor definitely goes to 11, with lots of jaw-dropping WTF moments—I mean, the maternity ward scene alone (shudders)—yet somehow Cregger makes it all simultaneously horrifying and funny with a bittersweet edge. Fans expecting a more direct treatment, featuring well-known playable characters, might feel a bit disappointed, but adapting the games to film and TV has proven to be a pretty formidable challenge… until now. Cregger has finally cracked the conundrum.
Resident Evil is now playing in theaters.
