I never played any of the Resident Evil video games, but I did watch every single one of the movies, including the justly maligned 2021 attempted reboot Welcome to Raccoon City. I find that I remember only two things from the entire series: the red dress that Milla Jovovich frequently wears, and the laser grid that kills her team in the original. That is a weak return for seven films.
Therefore, you won’t be surprised to learn that the re-reboot Resident Evil clears the low bar of being the best movie in the zombie franchise so far. With new director Zach Cregger fresh off the success of last year’s Weapons, it’s the movie that the video games deserved the whole time.
One way this movie succeeds is by keeping its focus on Bryan (Austin Abrams), an organ courier who has a very bad winter’s night delivering a high-priority shipment to Raccoon City General Hospital in Colorado. Navigating an icy country road, he hits a pedestrian who’s unaccountably in a summer dress and bare feet. When the sheriff (Johnno Wilson) happens along, Bryan makes the life-saving decision to have the lawman take the injured, incoherent woman to the hospital in his car. Sure enough, he then sees the cop car start swerving wildly until it rolls off the road.
Every scene here feels like a puzzle that Bryan has to solve, much the way he would if he were being controlled by a video game player. When he goes to a nearby farm for help, he’s chased into a barn by a guard dog and escapes by climbing up a ladder into the loft. Stupidly, he throws the ladder down at the dog, only to realize that he needs it to get back down to the ground.
Furthermore, every setting that he moves through feels fully realized as if it were designed for a video game, as Bryan finds a hunting rifle in the farmhouse and then has to pull open every drawer to find the ammunition for it. Just like a game protagonist, Bryan upgrades his weaponry from the dead sheriff’s sidearm to the rifle to an automatic firearm. Not that it helps much: Trying to shoot open a padlock with the handgun, Bryan cleanly misses the lock from 10 feet away and says, “I suck at guns!”
Cregger’s comedy background comes into play in other ways, much of it through Abrams’ performance as a terrified lightweight who’s not trained for his situation: “I’m a glorified Postmates guy!” When he’s picked up by an Umbrella Corporation scientist (Paul Walter Hauser) in an SUV, their banter is funny in its pettiness. The two men sit in the vehicle watching their armed escort (Kali Reis) disappear around a corner firing her weapon, and when she fails to return, they debate whether they should drive off without her. The virus that turns all its victims into zombies has to escape or the entire series has no story, and the chain of human incompetence and cowardice that makes this possible, while highly amusing, comes perilously close to Roger Ebert’s Idiot Plot.
This may be a mere paycheck job for Cregger — the early revelation that Bryan’s girlfriend (voiced by Sara Paxton) is pregnant is pandering pure and simple — but he doesn’t treat it like one. He brings a great deal of his skill to this video-game adaptation so that you don’t feel cheapened for enjoying the zombie shenanigans here. Saying that Cregger has brought this franchise back to life would make me sound like a hack critic, so instead I’ll just say that I appreciate his efforts. Who knows? Maybe he can make the Insidious series feel relevant again, if he’s not too busy.
Resident Evil/a>
Starring Austin Abrams. Directed by Zach Cregger. Written by Zach Cregger and Shay Hatten, based on the Capcom video game series. Rated R.
