The ‘Weapons’ director turns the long-running video-game franchise into a darkly funny, wildly inventive monster movie.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
I had the same reaction as many others when I heard that writer-director Zach Cregger (“Barbarian”) was going to do a reboot of “Resident Evil” after his triumphant small-town, folk horror sensation “Weapons” exploded on the scene last year. What? We’ve already had seven video-game-inspired “Resident Evil” films, six of them starring “reigning queen of kick-butt” Milla Jovovich. From 2002 to 2017, Jovovich appeared as the lead Alice in the “Resident Evil” films, many of them directed by her B-moviemaking Englishman husband Paul W. S. Anderson. I’ve seen some of them and found them distracting and amusing in a pulp horror kind of way, but forgettable and uninspired.
Enter Cregger, co-writer Shay Hatten (“John Wick: Chapter 4”) and a star-is-born lead actor Austin Abrams (“Weapons”). Together, they have made the dark, darkly funny, 1990s-adjacent, hair-raising tale of a hapless hospital courier named Brian Hodukavich (Abrams), who has a gleam of gold dangled before him when he is offered twice the payday if he takes “one more job,” delivering some organ in a cooler to the Raccoon City General Hospital. Cut to Brian behind the wheel of his beat-up SUV swerving on an icy road through a dark, towering forest (the film was shot in Prague).
It is a fairy tale-like setting of nightmares, of “Hansel and Gretel,” and suddenly Brian hits something that jumps into his headlights. He stops and walks back to where he made contact to find the imprint of a human body, blood in the snow and bare footprints leading away. Brian is a somewhat slight, young, working-class schlub with an attitude. Brian’s favorite word is, “bitch,” meant to describe those to whom he feels superior. His girlfriend Michelle is pregnant, and they are trying not-very-well to figure out how to proceed. He needs a haircut, better clothes. He probably had some college. His future is bleak, and it just got bleaker. He finds a bloodied woman, still alive on a dark path. He brings her back to his car. She reaches out at him awkwardly like the Bride of Frankenstein. He pushes her away. It’s funny. Soon, she is “safely” seat-belted into the car. The cooled organ box at her feet.
On one level, Cregger’s “Resident Evil” is an homage to John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982) and to maestro Rob Bottin’s practical creature effects, in this case created by Shane Mahan of Legacy Effects. One of the most frightening creatures in the film is a ball-like “The Substance”-evoking collection of melded bodies, dangling arms and legs and visible faces that can propel itself by using its multiple hands and feet to push forward. It is ravenous and relentlessly chases Brian through the woods and streets. This might be the most nightmarish image I have seen in a long time. Along with this rolling horror, Brian encounters a big black Doberman that has a surprise in store for him and a pathetic young girl in a trailer who doesn’t understand what is happening to her (What young girl does?).
With the poetic redundancy of nightmare (and the videogame), Brian also keeps encountering locks that he must breach. Although he is “no good” with guns, he collects them as they present themselves, including a police officer’s handgun with a safety he cannot find and an iconic double-barreled shotgun.
In Raccoon City, Brian teams up with a sharp-shooting police officer (Kali Reis of “True Detective”) and a shady rep from, yes, Umbrella Corporation (a fun Paul Walter Hauser). After enduring a rainfall of the infected, who leap from buildings and explode upon impact, and a hellish trip through the stinking sewers of Raccoon City, where he confronts a strange, Buddha-like figure, Brian gets inside the hospital and is informed that he must come up to the 24th floor. In order to reach his goal, a laboratory on the top floor, Brian must go through the hospital’s maternity ward. Considering what he and Michelle have been talking about, we can only imagine what horrors will await him there, and Cregger, Hatten and Abrams, this lovable, monster-movie schlemiel, do not disappoint. Remember the yellow acid from the “Alien” films? So does Cregger. Cregger’s “Resident Evil” is being called the best video-game adaptation ever made, even though Cregger and Hatten went outside of the universe of the game with their story, invoking the ire of some fans. Screw them. This picaresque “Resident Evil” is the greatest of all the T-virus monster movies that I’ve seen. Catch it.
‘Resident Evil’
Rating: R for strong bloody violence, gore and language throughout.
Cast: Austin Abrams, Paul Walter Hauser, Kali Reis
Director-writer: Zach Cregger
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Where to watch: In theaters
Grade: A-
