Resident Evil

Grade: A

Hollywood apparently felt Zach Creggar had proved himself after Barbarian and Weapons, so they gave him the keys to the Resident Evil franchise to take for a spin. This is the eighth Resident Evil movie. Creggar had never seen the previous seven. He just always loved the game. He has taken the storytelling instincts that made Barbarian and Weapons work and applied them to an established video-game world without requiring you to have any attachment to that world.

In other words, you don’t have to become a Resident Evil fan. If you’ve never played the game, you can appreciate it as the dizzyingly entertaining action fantasy that it is. There is plenty of “red meat,” so to speak, to appease the avid gamers. Several shots consist of the barrel of a rifle protruding into the frame at a diagonal while the camera travels down hallways and explores various corners.

But before we get there, we meet Bryan, played by Austin Abrams (the fidgety drug addict from Weapons). Bryan is a medical courier. After delivering something (probably an organ for a surgery) to a hospital, while sporadically on the phone arguing with his newly pregnant girlfriend about what to do about the baby, he impulsively picks up a last-minute assignment that pays well. He has to transport yet another thing (he rarely knows what it is) to a lab that requires a drive up snowy mountains—a trip that his vehicle isn’t accustomed to making.

This is interesting, exciting, compelling exposition and world-building. It’s the makings of any potentially great movie, never mind one that happens to be called and based on Resident Evil. I won’t describe what happens in the first segment of his journey, but it can best be summarized as a macabre comedy of errors. It’s one falling domino after another. From Dusk Till Dawn was an exhaustingly hip and enjoyable vampire disaster movie. It wasn’t serious, upstanding cinema, but for what it was, I hadn’t seen anything better. I wondered if there could BE another From Dusk Till Dawn. Thirty years later, we have it in the last place I’d ever expect to find it: with Creggar’s Resident Evil.

It can’t be overstated how funny this is, and I learned that jokes and comedic bits were even taken out after test screenings. Austin Abrams gives us a lead performance that reacts the same way any of us would if we were thrust into this same situation. Interactions with supporting characters played by Paul Walter Hauser and Zach Cherry ring true to life, even if the premise is anything but. The colors in the cinematography are beautiful. The sound design does its job. Creggar has an uncanny knack for planting the kinds of jump scares that come up in the least expected places. There’s one in particular that genuinely got me. There is always something to look at, listen to, be startled by, or laugh at. I had a blast watching this movie.

What Creggar does here is a shining lesson for filmmakers. You want to take niche material that’s been done more than a handful of times, make it accessible for outsiders to the material, and give it more life than the viewer would anticipate? THIS is how you do it. I’d had a bone to pick with Creggar. I was underwhelmed, to say the least, to hear that his follow-up to Weapons would be the eighth installment in a series I’d never seen about a video game I’d never played. To add insult to injury, he was too busy with production for Resident Evil to be able to do much of an Oscar campaign for Weapons. All this to say: he did it right. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go eat some serious crow.

Grade: A