Review: Resident Evil is the fresh take this flagging franchise really needed

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. 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.