Review | ‘Resident Evil’ is a goofy, gory blast
Courtesy of Sony Pictures.
“Resident Evil” is the latest twisted tale from horror maestro Zach Cregger and his most breathless, punishing and blissfully grotesque flick yet. Imagine picking up a video game controller while riding a roller coaster through a haunted house; this film goes to sickening places, but it never stops being fun.
Only loosely inspired by the games of the same name, we follow Bryan (Austin Abrams), an everyday courier on a standard run to drop an unknown organ off at a hospital when he’s offered an additional run to take another unknown package to Raccoon City. He accepts the offer, as it pays double and he’s in no rush to get back to his girlfriend in the midst of a pregnancy scare. The journey to Raccoon City immediately proves treacherous in a car not suited to traverse snowy terrain, but he plows forward — right into a woman who walks into the middle of the road. She survives the blow, trudging into the snow, and it becomes apparent that something is amiss. From there, Bryan’s night grows considerably worse, but his delivery becomes more vital than he can comprehend. He heads towards Raccoon City and along the way encounters and must fend off a cornucopia of undead enemies in the way of his delivery.
Austin Abrams has a near impossible task in leading this film. He’s taking on practically every part you could imagine a young, up-and-coming actor like himself having to inhabit. He’s the comedic relief, action hero and the emotional core simultaneously and successfully. It’s a performance that constantly risks overindexing any of those facets, always bursting at the seams just a bit, but is really the glue that holds the movie together.
He’s the one running and screaming from zombie rats, but also has to draw the movie to a halt, in one of the rare moments where the movie takes a breath, to leave his girlfriend a tearful voice memo about his prior doubts about the prospect of fatherhood. As much fun as I was having, I was waiting for the moment where the film tapped into something deeper. “Resident Evil” is no parable for anything outside of its own universe, but the contentious phone call with Bryan’s girlfriend about her possible pregnancy is not a one-off. It’s a pretty shrewd storytelling maneuver to take a character this woefully equipped to accept the idea of new life within his own and then put him through the worst night of his life, where he must battle with zombie babies, children and even, at one point, make his way through a maternity ward. He can’t escape his personal doomsday event in the midst of navigating an actual one.
It’s clear that Cregger saw something in his character’s scrappy, hapless ventures that lead him towards doom and has given him a more hapless character who runs into even more treacherous territory. It's like an audience member walked into the screen with the same level of suitability to face the enemies he does. It’s like Cregger knows that Abrams has an everyman quality, a twinkle in the eye that endears us to him, that he’s able to harness the audience’s investment. It gives the moments where Bryan has these faint glimmers of traditional cinematic heroism a renewed, electrifying quality. We want to see this guy make it out, but at the same time, we’re here for the horrors that would thwart that result.
In approaching adaptation, Cregger has elected to veer in a different direction, not directly adapting any of the games or populating the world with the characters from them (however, drops from the in-game glossary: the Umbrella Corporation and Raccoon City both got pops from the crowd I was in). This has drawn the ire of the gamers and fans, who have for months questioned Cregger’s fit and his approach to bringing this story to the big screen, while omitting these elements. There have even been (foolish) suggestions — made months before anyone had even seen the finished film, mind you — that he just made a zombie movie and slapped the title of their beloved series on it.
Like all things online related to great motion pictures from our finest filmmakers, this online chatter was all just the noise (of whiny losers who find a safe haven spouting nonsense in a comment section), because he’s delivered a film that adapts the feeling of playing a video game and succeeded in that more than countless adaptations of video games. The camera glides with the smooth ease of your thumb upon a joystick, often to take in a new, uncertain environment and look for signs of a monster lurking. At one point, Bryan watches in awe through a windshield as an unknown enforcer, who’s come to his aid, takes out a pack of the undead with ease, which felt akin to handing off the controller to someone who’s logged hours on hours within a game. There are certainly more direct attempts to mimic the controller experience; the film will drop into Bryan’s first-person POV, which, for a moment, is like you’re watching a walkthrough on the big screen. These maneuvers resist becoming a gimmick because Cregger doesn’t rely on them too much, but also finds more creative, surprising ways to tap into the mid-game feeling, bringing you further into the dread of the film’s world.
There’s an active quality to so many of the film’s set pieces. They have a real sense of the unexpected to them. Even though he’s our lead, between his frequent screw-ups and just how quickly the world has devolved, Bryan never feels safe or secure by virtue of his protagonist status. Cregger orchestrates these sequences where he encounters a new kind of threat around the push and pull between steadily raising the tension and then exploding into chaos, which recalls the in-game experience of stealthily creeping through a hallway and having to make a mad dash once discovered; the sense that the control you have in the moments of quiet is an illusion, just part of the path to the chaos.
Where the film ascends to the next level, though, is bringing to life sequences that could only be achieved to the fullest extent with the blend of the visceral and the cinematic. One sequence includes a mad dash down an empty city street that’s soon strewn with the mangled bodies of the infected who leap from above to try to take Bryan down, exploding like water balloons full of blood. I don’t know from where Cregger conjured it, but I’m delighted it exists. This one scene is a testament to Cregger’s storytelling strengths; it is horrific, but very exciting and rendered with a briskness that keeps you with Bryan in his fight-or-flight pushed to its absolute limit, with the right kind of absurd to have a comedic edge to it as well.
Cregger’s past horror movies have a similar penchant for going wild at the end and I welcome the panache. This movie is no different, going to places that may surprise genre fans, with some Cronenbergian body horror that escalates, but it's perhaps less likely to shock seasoned fans of the games familiarized with its lore and set of antagonists. “Resident Evil” is simultaneously the truest test and most awesome showcase of Cregger’s ability to oscillate between the most delight you could have at the movies and shaking you up with images and creatures from the pits of hell. I loved it and recommend you go and be spun up yourself.
My rating: 4 out of 5 paws
