Zach Cregger, the mad genius behind Weapons, takes a crack at the Resident Evil franchise in his reboot of the 30-year-old video game universe. Bryan (Austin Abrams) is a medical courier. He’s a sketchy gig-economy delivery driver taking human organs to hospitals. After a late delivery, he’s enticed by a huge bonus to make one last urgent run to a hospital in Raccoon City. He drives his own crappy car, and is distracted by his girlfriend revealing she’s pregnant while trying to navigate slippery roads in a snowstorm. He accepts the job because of the money, and because he wants to avoid the “what do you want to do about the pregnancy” discussion.
On a remote icy road he hits a woman who steps in front of his car and the bloody adventure begins. The woman is infected by a bio-weapon virus, as is nearly everyone he encounters as he pushes on toward Raccoon City. She’s essentially a mutating zombie, but he doesn’t know that when he puts her in his car. These creatures are rage-monsters, bent on consuming and absorbing every living thing they see.
Bryan is a slacker, he’s not an ambitious, nor particularly cerebral man-boy, and he has little skill with firearms he acquires, despite countless hours of video games. He is having trouble getting his mind around what’s happening, and initially in denial about the monsters. His quest to make it to the hospital takes him through a gauntlet of infected, complicated by cowardly and inept Umbrella Corporation employees.
For those not familiar, the original 1996 Capcom video game is set in the 1980s where the population has been decimated by catastrophic outbreaks of manufactured biological weapons, including mutagenic viruses created by corrupt Big Pharma corporations. The primary company making the viruses is called the Umbrella Corporation, in a lab located in the fictional U.S. Midwestern town of Raccoon City. The video game was the basis for a 2002 film starring Milla Jovovich, which was followed by six sequels. The last attempt at a reboot was in 2021 with Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City.
“On the icy road to Raccoon City he hits a woman who steps in front of his car …”
Cregger plays the story for laughs, jump-scares, and violent gore, a winning combination that has the audience giggling and screaming. Austin Abrams, who played a drug addict in Weapons, captures the perfect tone for Bryan as a hapless man whose circumstances go beyond his control. The movie, for much of the mercifully normal runtime of 90 minutes (editors are going nuts with 120-180 minute runtimes. If it’s The Odyssey, sure, but that’s rare), includes scenes filmed in first-person shooter style. The original Resident Evil game is presented in third person with more narrative puzzle-solving, but the first-person perspective works for this film. Very little is explained, which keeps us focused on the action, as Bryan crashes through legions of the infected on the streets of the destroyed city to get to the hospital.
There are questions to consider: Do we need another Resident Evil movie (after seven films and eight video games)? Is this, in fact, a Resident Evil movie? If you remove references to “Umbrella Corporation” and “Raccoon City” there would be little to indicate that it is. Can you just slap a label on it and ride the IP name recognition? Does it matter if Cregger is successfully defying categorization?
Cregger’s Resident Evil is a raucous, exhilarating romp that lampoons the tropes of the previous movies (and the genre as a whole). The result is as funny as it is scary (like Weapons). He excels at subverting established ideas, as he did in Weapons and Barbarian. His goal was to make the cinematic experience feel more like playing the video game, and that comes across brilliantly. But there’s nothing groundbreaking here, nothing we haven’t seen before, it’s just Cregger throwing toys around someone else’s sandbox.
Resident Evil is irreverent and funny, includes buckets of gore, and enough jump scares to rattle the audience. However, this approach to IP material may not have staying power in sequels, as the notion of running around backstage and burning down the sets will get old very quickly.
"…irreverent, funny, and includes buckets of gore and jump scares"
