‘Resident Evil’ Review: Zach Cregger’s Relentless Adaptation Is the Future of Video Game Movies, Even When Too Goofy for Its Own Good

It’s hard to tell — and even harder to care — whether a small but attention-starved contingent of “Resident Evil” loyalists actually made a preemptive stink about Zach Cregger’s radical new take on the video game franchise, or if algorithmic rage cycles have become so predictable and endemic to the discourse that everyone just assumed that they had. Whatever the case, this much is clear: Cregger’s singular, madcap, arcade-style riff on the survival-horror series that started it all is a massive and rapidly mutating middle finger to the Comic-Con-brained idea that video game adaptations should just give “the fans” what they think they want.

Cregger’s movie arrives in the wake of 2021’s “Welcome to Raccoon City,” a miserable cosplay which attempted to course-correct the nü-metal nuttiness of Paul W.S. Anderson’s movies by slavishly retelling the story of the first two “Resident Evil” titles. The “Weapons” director’s DLC-like approach to the zombie saga pivots back in the opposite direction with a giddy smile on its face. You’ll find no characters from those PlayStation classics (ditto their more recent sequels), nor any narrative connection to the series’ mythology beyond a shared location and a brief reference to the evil Umbrella Corporation. Easter eggs come by the dozen, but the movie’s fast, freaky undead more resemble — and behave like — the “Last of Us” infected than the slow-moving groaners from the early games.

And yet, for all its creative liberties, this is the first “Resident Evil” movie that actually — and rather viscerally — evokes what it feels like to play “Resident Evil.”

The white-knuckled helplessness of entering a new room and flinching at the way it’s framed to emphasize all the places a monster could jump out. The addictively queasy tug-of-war between wanting to explore the next section and wanting to just say “nope” and turn the whole thing off. The headache of item management, the thrill of blowing a villager’s head off with your last shotgun round, only to see tentacles sprout out of its neck hole as it grows more powerful. Cregger’s side-quest-sized story about a hapless courier has been genetically engineered in an Umbrella Corp. lab as the perfect vehicle for all these sense memories, to the point that his “Resident Evil” better reflects the essence of its source material than any of the previous movies. That’s despite how it eschews the franchise’s melodramatic tone in favor of postmodern glee, and ditches its deep(ly ridiculous) mythology in favor of… well, pretty much nothing aside from some errant anxieties about bringing a kid into a world that’s evolving out of our control. That’s what you get when you hire the guy who made “Weapons,” I suppose.

A lean, gripping, and relentless goof absent any trace of the cart-before-the-horse ambitions that have crushed the life out of blockbuster cinema in the age of I.P., Cregger’s “Resident Evil” is so cut to the bone that it starts mid-sentence and drops its closing title card at what feels like might be the start of its third act. In other words, some poor schmuck is about to have the worst night of his life, and he’s only gonna need about 85 minutes to do it.

Played by “Weapons” and “Whalefall” star Austin Abrams, perfect as a relatably frazzled everyman who struggles to process how fucked up everything has gotten around him, Bryan is just a twentysomething delivery guy so petrified of a more serious life that he’d rather drive a medical cooler through an overnight snowstorm in his Subaru Outback than go home to talk to his (offscreen) girlfriend Michelle about the results of her at-home pregnancy test. Off to Raccoon City he goes! Alas, poor Bryan is about to learn the hard way that change — as the saying goes — is as hard to outrun as an ever-growing zombie rat king with 37 different limbs and a weirdly personal vendetta.

But don’t worry, the childless Cregger hasn’t turned “Resident Evil” into an Apatowian piece of pronatalist propaganda. Like “Barbarian” and “Weapons” before it, his third solo feature is less interested in thematizing a clear lesson than it is in gruesomely perverting domestic idyll, which assumes a wide variety of “The Thing”-worthy forms as Bryan makes his way across the Midwestern tundra. (It’s been a minute since a Hollywood movie has delivered so many ropelike tentacles and/or slimy animatronic monsters.) The film is only a few seconds old before the fun kicks off with a sustained and brilliant setpiece — one that typifies the hard-reset pleasures of Cregger’s less-is-more approach, as well as his rewarding preference for immersive terror over numb CGI spectacle. Not to mention his signature talent for using humor to keep his scares grounded at a human scale.

In short: Bryan hits a woman with his car, and then tries to ignore the rictus grin on her face as he buckles her into his passenger seat and speeds towards the nearest hospital (which is where he was going anyway). Things go sideways. They go sideways with a precision that highlights the practical challenges of surviving a zombie attack in the frozen middle of nowhere. Loading a gun with shaky hands in real-time. Using a barn ladder to outwit an aggressive guard dog. Trying to reverse-engineer what happened to the people in an abandoned farmhouse from the mess they left behind. (Fan service temp check: There’s a typewriter on the desk, but no precisely dated journal entries in the drawers.)

As if creating an invisible mini-map for the audience in real-time, Cregger ensures that we’re always acutely aware of where Bryan is in relation to where he’s going and whatever’s trying to kill him, and that attention to local geography — per the rhythm of the games — allows the movie to derive its scares from the process of getting from one place to another instead of alternating between exploration and combat. Case in point: This movie boasts some of the grossest monsters you’ll ever see on screen, but its hero’s most terrifying nemesis might be the padlocks that block his progress at every gate. The answers to Bryan’s problems are never far out of reach, but solving easy puzzles under pressure is as “Resident Evil” as it gets.

If the basic nature of Bryan’s challenges — open this door, find a way through that camper van, make it to the 24th floor of the burning skyscraper — allows “Resident Evil” to exalt in the triumph of conquering simple obstacles and make audiences cheer when the movie’s hero actually manages to do something right, that approach’s efficacy is rooted in the ruthlessness of Cregger’s storytelling. This is survival-horror on hard mode. Refusing to be edgy for edginess’ sake, Cregger nevertheless delights in every aspect of the fucked-up nastiness that’s uniquely permitted by the horror genre. I mean, in what other kind of movie could a character become more sympathetic by shooting a child in the face with a shotgun?

‘Resident Evil’©Sony Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

As with “Barbarian” and “Weapons” before it, “Resident Evil” isn’t just gory; it’s also mean in a way that makes you laugh. Mean in a way that makes it more absurd and true-to-life all at once. Mean in a way that allows Bryan’s fear of settling down to assume the form of a mewling little monster girl who begs him for help, a giant baby whose belly explodes into rats, and a climactic stroll through a hospital maternity ward that’s, ya know, somewhat less sweet and precious than you’d otherwise expect.

“Resident Evil” races from one memorable incident to another with nary a loading screen between them, though the breathless pace of Cregger’s plotting and its jokey funhouse tenor are both exposed as flimsy whenever the movie slows to anything less than a breakneck sprint. After the nonstop adrenaline rush of its opening 30 minutes, which are thrilling enough to make you hope that Bryan doesn’t run into another living soul for the rest of the night, you can feel the air start to leak out of the tires the second he does.

I like both of the very recognizable actors he comes across, neither of whom are on screen for very long, but their characters widen the movie’s scope in a way that makes the whole thing a lot sillier at the precise moment that it could benefit from a richer sense of Raccoon City’s nightmare. Instead of contrasting the comic absurdity of Bryan’s journey with the seriousness of a manmade biohazard, or undergirding the action with the kind of grim mythos that lets the games tell such ridiculous stories with a straight face, Cregger reduces it to a good ol’ goof.

There’s fun to be had in that, and this “Resident Evil” stays impressively true to itself through its very last frame, but there’s a reason “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead” isn’t set along the fringes of a comedy. While Cregger’s adaptation doesn’t suffer from the absence of Leon Kennedy or Albert Wesker or any of that stuff, the movie can’t help but float off the ground without the gravity a stronger sense of context provides. It’s the kind of thing that makes you squint a bit harder at the rows of residential housing in Raccoon City and think, “Huh, I never realized how much Eastern European architecture there was in the American Midwest.”

But if “Resident Evil” falls short of the generational masterpiece that Cregger seems capable of making from this source material, I suppose that’s the price we have to pay for a video game movie that’s such a fucking blast for so insistently doing its own thing. This is I.P. cinema with vision and verve — a blockbuster that nakedly leverages its brand recognition in the service of a healthy budget, putting butts in seats, and pretty much nothing else aside from reminding people what they loved about it in the first place, before the biggest “fans” confused the forest for the trees. This is how movies and video games can merge in a way that makes them stronger for sharing their DNA rather than disfiguring them both.

Grade: B+

Sony Pictures Releasing will release “Resident Evil” in theaters on Friday, September 18.