Game On
Zach Cregger turns in the funniest ‘Resident Evil’ ever. WTF?
Resident Evil
Director: Zach Cregger • Writers: Zach Cregger, Shay Hatten, based on the game by Capcom
Starring: Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, Paul Walter Hauser
USA • 1hr 34mins
Opens Hong Kong September 17 • IIB
Grade: B+
You really haven’t lived until you’ve seen body bombs. There’s no other way to describe the monstered-out citizens of Raccoon City that chase hapless medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams) from the rooftops around Raccoon City General Hospital and hurl themselves down to the street in an effort to, if not murder him, at least scare the shit out of him. It’s gory, goopy and splattery, and one of Resident Evil’s stand-out action-horror set pieces that isn’t funny. Because despite the moody lighting, thick atmosphere and at least one premium jump scare, Resident Evil is very funny.
Gamer or not, after six middling yet wildly successful adaptations by Paul WS Anderson spanning 15 years, and the messy Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City from 2021 by Johannes Roberts (whose Primate was actually a fair amount of fun) it’s way too easy to be sceptical of another attempt at bringing Capcom’s 200-million-selling video game franchise to the screen, particularly with co-writer Shay Hatten – he of Ballerina, two John Wick chapters, and Zack Snyder’s wheat saga Star Wars knock-off Rebel Moon fame (among some other hard core dreck) – in the co-pilot’s seat. John Wick? Cool. The rest? Not so much. But lo and behold, Hatten and trustworthy director Zach Cregger have pulled off a minor miracle and made a good Resident Evil movie. Juicy, and very often straight-up disgusting, but good.
Tip of the iceberg
The wisdom in this attempt at adapting the game is that Cregger and Hatten didn’t try to adapt the game. They used the game’s well established world and the skeleton of its mythology as a jumping off point for an original story and original characters, in the process likely pissing off fans as well as giving them a sense of relief. No one can say Bryan is “unfaithful” to the source material when he’s not in it. This Resident Evil (produced by PlayStation Productions, joining Sega, Mattel, Nintendo… studios) has more of an Evil Dead vibe than either a Barbarian or Weapons one, the former which put Cregger on everyone’s horror radar, the latter making him a star. But this is like neither of those, the cheeky humour and stand-out turn by Abrams (the junkie in Weapons) aside, and somehow makes a case for itself as the best Resident movie yet.
When we meet Bryan, he’s a bit of a disaster area, debating with his clearly miffed girlfriend over the phone about having kids as he carries out his job as a medical courier on a snowy night. When he thinks he’s on the last run of his shift, he gets offered an urgent, high-paying gig, and winds up driving through the mountains without chains on his tires to Raccoon City. Along the way he meets the county sheriff (Johnno Wilson) who escorts him to RC so he can hear Bryan’s story about hitting a random woman (Andrea Miltnerová) that came flying out of the woods; Carl, an evidently klutzy Umbrella Corporation scientist (Paul Walter Hauser, The Fantastic Four: First Steps); his silent security Maxine (Kali Reis, Mercy); and finally another Umbrella researcher, Dave (Zach Cherry, Apple TV’s Severance). In between there are more squelching viscera, zombie hordes, otherworldly lab-borne monstrosities, exploding sewer dwellers and crazy dogs per frame than any movie this year. All packed into a concise 90-odd minutes.
What makes all this work, aside from tight pacing, stellar body horror and fantastically gross bits, is DOP Dariusz Wolski’s (1994’s The Crow, Ridley Scott’s shooter since 2012, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise) ace photography. Clearly the guy knows how to capture darkness without blotting out the action, and the sequence where Bryan drives down the barren, unlit, tree-lined road into Raccoon City alone is worth the IMAX. But Wolski maximises alleys and corners and contrasting glaring labs to create a creepy, disorienting mood that Cregger can proceed to inject with left-field humour that strangely works. He knows how long to hold the camera still, and also knows when to let Wolski loose with a handheld. It helps that Abrams – effectively the only character we get to know – announces himself as one of the most appealing young leading actors working now. He stole the show the show from Brad Pitt and George Clooney in Wolfs, he almost stole it from Amy Madigan in Weapons (a bigger leap), and chances that the forthcoming Whalefall isn’t at least… creative are low. He shrieks like a kindergartener in just the right doses, his profane muttering about his bananas circumstances are hilarious and entirely relatable, as are his freak-outs when his frustrations finally bubble over. There’s some hoo-haa in here about choices and fear and embracing change, but it’s buried beneath the guts, gore and a man-made abomination that rivals the end result in The Substance. Nasty. Yay!