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Writer/director Zach Cregger switches up his storytelling impulses for Resident Evil, and not just because he’s working from pre-existing material for the first time. His first two horror features, Barbarian and Weapons, were non-linear exercises hopping between different points of view. They could suddenly grind one plotline to a halt before jumping to a wholly separate character's story to immensely compelling effect.
Though Resident Evil draws on a Capcom franchise spanning 11+ games (not to mention countless other pieces of media, including seven prior movie adaptations), it uses a simpler story structure. Cregger’s 93-minute chase movie is like a zombie-riddled After Hours. One guy just navigating a chronological series of increasingly madcap ordeals over a solitary night. Weapons was a horror epic. Resident Evil is intentionally more streamlined.
Cregger and Shay Hatten’s screenplay begins with medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams) walking into a hospital on a phone call with his girlfriend. Their tense chat about his partner being pregnant is cut off by his job obligation. This guy always juggles so many plates and mundane hurdles. Just as he's departing to clock out, a hospital staffer asks him if he wants to make one more delivery to the snow-covered, mountainside domicile of Raccoon City. Since this important gig pays double, Bryan accepts.
Armed with a portable green cooler containing the pivotal item, Bryan’s off on his quest. Immediately, Resident Evil’s protagonist encounters trouble when a disoriented woman leaps in front of his car. Suddenly, a guy with no survival experience whatsoever is stuck in an isolated, snowy Hell that keeps throwing new pursuers at him. Said pursuers are a malicious bunch prone to bursting out tentacles or taking a chomp out of his body. So begins Bryan’s grueling night fueling Resident Evil. Those Umbrella Corps. folks who ordered this delivery better tip well.
It's akin to saying "Terminator: Dark Fate is the best Terminator since Terminator 2!", but Resident Evil is automatically up there with Exit 8 and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 as the best live-action video game movie ever made. Cregger's route to that accomplishment is simple. Past video game movie misfires often fell into two categories. One boondoggle functioned as a tedious prologue too obsessed with teeing up potential sequels that would be faithful adaptations of their source material (2018's Tomb Raider, 2021's Mortal Kombat, Assassin's Creed). Then there were failures Warcraft and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. These focused on the most tedious characters imaginable and trapped audiences in excessively convoluted narratives.
The sweaty creative impulses binding these foolhardy video game movies are absent in Resident Evil. Cregger isn’t interested in saving all the fun stuff for potential follow-ups. Nor does he bake everything in too many “twists” or subplots. No matter your pre-existing Resident Evil knowledge (I have none, for the record), this feature excels at delivering enjoyable scares. Just focusing on cromulent filmmaking and entertainment puts Resident Evil heads and shoulders above most denizens in this tortured cinematic realm.
Much of that entertainment comes from Cregger and Hatten rendering Bryan’s exploits as one lengthy series of dominos colliding into each other. Randomly firing off his gun at a zombie ends up inhibiting his car, for example. Similarly, impulsively tossing a ladder down at a pursuing dog comes back to bite him. On and on, the ripple effects of his behavior go. Like Walter White or that foolish person who gave a mouse a cookie, everything Bryan does has consequences. Committing to that informs Resident Evil’s most pulse-pounding sequences and its darkest laughs.
That quality’s connected to another critical virtue of this script: Bryan’s everyman nature. This character doesn’t start Resident Evil a clumsy oaf and then immediately become a hero once chaos emerges. If a dark corridor looks too ominous, he’ll likely bounce rather than venture forth without blinking. He’s constantly a decidedly ordinary guy reacting to everything around him vulnerably. It’s constantly engaging to see that persona clash up against increasingly unhinged zombies. Plus, emphasizing this quality ensures there’s always tension for whatever gory set piece Resident Evil cooks up next. This guy's ability to perish is always potently palpable.
It isn't just Bryan making Resident Evil a hoot, though. The various undead/enhanced adversaries are also terrifically realized. Artists like concept designer Dean Sherriff, makeup artists like Jakub Gründler and Vera Boyadzhieva, and animatronic designer Johnnie Spence (among many others) deliver exquisite, grody work manifesting these creatures. Happily, their creativity also becomes more prominent as the runtime progresses.
As Resident Evil’s story transpires, Bryan encounters increasingly bizarre zombies. Initially, he just runs into (literally) a woman with odd eyes and rigid limbs. Over an hour later, Bryan’s contending with a massive toad/human hybrid with acid vomit. Letting the Resident Evil foes ramp up in visual outlandishness ensures the artists behind these characters fly their freak flag high. The movie is all the better for such remarkable makeup and design work. Plus, this narrative approach ensures there’s always something new around the corner to freak audiences out.
Unfortunately, several of these entities materialize via CGI. That tool isn’t inherently bad, some of these warped creations couldn’t come to life any other way. However, the heavy presence (especially in the third act) of digital foes automatically ensures Resident Evil is a step down from the more tangibly realized Barbarian and Weapons. Meanwhile, the scripts gives Bryan way too many superfluous lines commenting on the world or challenges around him. I don’t need Bryan saying “I am so bad at shooting” after he proves subpar firing a gun once again. The visual of him constantly failing is amusing before an extraneous line poking you in the ribs.
That flaw is extra frustrating since Austin Abrams is a strong physical performer. He can sell Bryan’s internal world without these asides. After stealing the show in Weapons, Abrams proves more than capable of headlining a feature with Josh Brolin and Julia Garner nowhere in sight. I especially love how instantly believable his franticness is. When he’s portraying Bryan scrambling to get bullets into a shotgun or running for his life as zombies jump off nearby rooftops, you can feel the sweat pouring down his forehead or the trembling of his fingers. His conviction in portraying Bryan as a normal human who somehow wound up in a Resident Evil storyline is sublime.
Two other returning Weapons artists, composers Hays and Ryan Holladay, also deliver quality work in Zach Cregger’s latest concoction. Their often sparser compositions, heavy on clanking noises, sometimes effectively echo the “James” track that introduced Abrams’ Weapons character. However, that musical route also captures how ill-prepared Bryan is confronting Raccoon City’s chaos. He doesn’t have a lush orchestra backing up his exploits. Instead, much like how he has only his cooler and whatever weapons he uncovers, Bryan’s got ominous, stripped-down, electronic-informed creations accompanying his voyages.
The Holladay duo delivers superb sonic parallels to this guy’s journey. Their craftsmanship and commitment to emphasizing Bryan’s outmatched nature are two virtues heavily informing Resident Evil as a whole. The digital frights and self-aware remarks are unquestionably frustrating. However, this fusion of Brian Yuzna and After Hours also features the dynamite bleak yuks, sharp visuals, and excellent scares Zach Cregger’s name is associated with. The director's “weakest” horror project yet is still a great time towering above most other zombie films and video game movies.
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