There has always been a strange disconnect between the Resident Evil games and their movie adaptations. I’m not going to lie, sometimes, it’s hard to find a good film adaptation of a video game. Off the top of my head, examples like Doom (2005), Tomb Raider (2018), and of course Resident Evil (2002) are all video game adaptations that fall far from cinematic excellence, and land somewhere between mediocre and just bad. Recently, we have gotten more consistent and better fare with The Last of Us and Fallout series and now Resident Evil from director Zach Cregger.
Cregger is the director behind Barbarian and Weapons and has taken on a beloved 30-year survival-horror franchise. That alone makes this a tough ask. Anytime a director has a huge and long-standing fanbase to cater to, they face an uphill battle … just ask Disney’s Star Wars team. Instead of trying to make another bloated mythology dump or a beat-for-beat recreation of one of the games, he chose the most difficult path: to make a genuinely entertaining and original Resident Evil movie.
It is scary. It is funny. It is occasionally disgusting. Most importantly, it actually feels like Resident Evil the game. The story is deliberately simple. Bryan, played by Austin Abrams, is a medical courier who agrees to make one last delivery, and that decision lands him in Raccoon City on the worst possible night. It’s no spoiler to say a viral outbreak connected to Umbrella Corporation turns the city into a nightmare, and Bryan is running for his life while trying to deliver his cargo.
That’s essentially it. Thankfully.
The script, Cregger co-wrote with Shay Hatten, doesn’t waste time over-explaining every corner of the Resident Evil universe, we don’t have waves of character introductions. There is no exhausting history lesson about Umbrella. Instead, Cregger drops Bryan into the middle of chaos and lets the audience figure things out. It’s truly refreshing as a film goer, to not be treated like I’ve been lobotomized.
Resident Evil the game is fundamentally about discovery, where you don’t know what’s waiting around the next corner. You don’t know whether you have enough ammunition. You don’t know if the hallway is about to become a death trap. The film is faithful to this and built around constant feelings of uncertainty. Bryan is almost always moving, scrambling from one problem to another, scavenging whatever weapons, ammunition and supplies he can find. Every bullet feels important.
That authenticity extends far beyond the basic premise. Fans will have a field day spotting the little details Cregger has planted throughout the film. Inventory items, medical supplies, ammunition and other familiar pieces of Resident Evil iconography are woven naturally into the production design. Yes, there is a typewriter. Bryan isn’t a superhero. He isn’t an elite soldier or a trained special agent. He’s a guy who took a crappy delivery job because it paid double and suddenly found himself trapped in a city full of homicidal monsters. Abrams spends much of the film looking like a man who desperately wants someone to explain what is happening.
In the movie’s tight 90 minutes, it finds plenty of time to be genuinely hilarious. Much of the movie’s humor comes from Bryan’s increasingly frantic reactions to the insanity surrounding him. He mumbles, panics, improvises and occasionally seems genuinely offended by the ridiculous obstacles standing between him and survival. There’s a wonderfully relatable quality to it, particularly for anyone who has ever played a Resident Evil game and wondered why the protagonist can’t simply shoot the damn lock instead of hunting down three different keys scattered throughout a mansion.
Cregger never allows the joke to destroy the horror and that’s the movie’s biggest achievement. It comes naturally from the situation. Bryan is terrified, confused and increasingly frustrated, and watching a completely ordinary person react to completely extraordinary circumstances is inherently funny. The balance is remarkably effective.
When Resident Evil wants to be frightening, it is frightening. Cregger has a real understanding of how much you don’t need to show. The movie frequently keeps monsters partially hidden, allowing shadows, movement and sound to do much of the work. By the time the film finally gives us a good look at some of its more grotesque creations, the anticipation has already done its job. And when the monsters do arrive, Cregger is more than happy to get nasty.
Tentacled creatures that wouldn’t look out of place in a John Carpenter nightmare, acid-spewing zombies and grotesquely swollen biological horrors provide plenty of old-school monster-movie goodness. The practical effects and gore are wonderfully excessive. People don’t simply get shot and fall over. Bodies erupt. Blood sprays. Flesh gets crushed, ripped apart and generally treated with very little dignity. It is disgusting and fun. That mixture of genuine tension and gleefully nasty gore is exactly what the movie needs.
There will undoubtedly be some longtime fans who are disappointed that this isn’t a direct adaptation starring Jill Valentine or Leon S. Kennedy. Those complaints are understandable. But attempting to recreate one of the games would miss the point. The games already exist and provide those characters an interactive version of this experience. A movie doesn’t need to recreate that.
What Cregger has ultimately created is not a traditional video game adaptation. It’s something better suited to the material: a movie that understands the experience of the video games while giving its director enough freedom to tell his own story. It truly earns a 9/10.
