Sometime in the last few years, Hollywood has realised there is a lot of money in making movies based on video games.
Mario, Minecraft, and Sonic have all become franchises, and Hollywood is now taking another crack at adapting the Resident Evil games.
Six Resident Evil movies starring Milla Jovovich were put out between 2002 and 2017, with those films enjoying cult status, but were hardly well-respected.
The Jovovich films never rose above the level of guilty pleasure, and while the films have their own clear sense of identity, they have very little in common with the games, let alone a typical zombie movie.
Weapons director Zach Cregger has been tasked with bringing his deft touch to the zombie franchise, and largely succeeds at making a Resident Evil movie that captures the tension of the PlayStation 1 era games.
Cregger’s version of Resident Evil follows a courier who is caught up in the early stages of the zombie outbreak depicted in the games; the ludicrous, slow-motion action sequences are out, and a personal, almost intimate character study is in.
Weapons star Austin Abrams (who played a wandering drug addict who stumbles upon the mystery in that movie) is the heart of this film, never leaving his side.
Abrams’ courier character is what would happen if a Tim Robinson character from I Think You Should Leave finds itself in the middle of a zombie outbreak; in these movies, we are used to a cool Bruce Willis type cracking one-liners and saving the day.
In this movie, our hero is a bumbling idiot who can’t shoot the lock off a gate.
Cregger successfully captures the Resident Evil experience by having the main character act like someone playing the original PlayStation 1 game, badly.
We were huge fans of Weapons; the film went all the way to the Oscars and more importantly, landed a slot on our year-end 10 last year.
In our review for Weapons, we noted that Cregger has more than a touch of Wes Craven to him; he is brilliant at establishing tension and mood, and then releases the valve when the audience least expects it.
While fans of the games have sniffed that Cregger isn’t adapting their exact favourite game from the series or indulging in fan service, the structure of this movie is faithful in terms of adapting a video game.
The plot and structure of the movie follow a video game route; it starts on the road, gets in an accident, fights off a zombie, discovers a farmhouse, finds a tunnel, a sewer, meets side characters, and there is an ultimate overall objective.
Cregger shoots some sequences from a first-person perspective, almost as if you are playing a video game, and he nails the tension of creeping around the corner, hoping that a zombie isn’t waiting around the corner to bite your face off.
Cregger’s background in sketch comedy (fellow millennials know him best as one of the forces behind The Whitest Kids U Know), means that Resident Evil is also very, very funny in spots.
There are some moments of horror, but Cregger takes the edge off with a well-deployed joke or absurd scenario.
While we are going to recommend this film (try to catch this one with a crowd; it adds a lot of energy that will be missing if you wait to watch this on Netflix), it’s almost too funny in parts.
We aren’t saying that comedy and horror can’t co-exist (An American Werewolf In London and Evil Dead 2 are masterpieces for this exact reason), but the comedy-to-horror ratio is slightly off in this instance.
Cregger’s 2022 film Barbarian and Weapons gained a lot of power by having this creeping sense of mystery and dread, and then he revealed how he pulled off the magic trick.
Horror and comedy are very similar; the build-up is absolutely crucial, or else the punchline doesn’t work.
In this instance, there’s not enough build-up and suspense, and too much focus on the punchline.
The film needed one or two more sequences where our hero wanders into a dark room and doesn’t know if something is going to jump out at him, but that is traded off for sequences that feel, for lack of a better term, video game-y.
One sequence has our hero taking a lift, but the roof and the floor start to fall away because an acid-spitting zombie is spilling their guts from a higher floor.
Beneath him, a mass of zombies are coming towards him, and he has to try to find a way to eliminate both problems at once.
If Resident Evil has a frame of reference, it is the Martin Scorsese film After Hours.
Both movies are about a guy who just wants to get home, but the universe keeps conspiring against him to make his life as difficult as possible.
Having the relentless intensity works wonders for a movie like this; you know as much about the zombie outbreak as our main character, and the movie doesn’t stop dead in its tracks for 10 minutes to explain the motivations of the corporation that caused the outbreak.
At 90 minutes on the dot, Resident Evil barely has an ounce of fat on it; the movie feels like listening to a Metallica album where the intensity rarely lets up from start to finish.
There are parts where Cregger lets his main character (and the audience) breathe before throwing them back into the ring.
The zombie movie genre has seen a number of evolutions since the days of George Romero; Night Of The Living Dead was an allegory for political tension in 1960s America (and invented the shambling zombie as we know it) and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later introduced the fast, sprinting zombie.
Resident Evil’s contribution to the zombie genre is having zombies bunch up on top of each other, like a twisted game of Jenga and Twister.
George Romero himself was considered to direct the first Resident Evil movie in 2002; when watching this film, one can only imagine how he would feel about zombie movies becoming a genre, considering he invented zombies as we know them today.
At their very best, the zombie movie serve as social commentary (in the Romero style) or look to build upon the tropes and ideas of old zombie movies (the Boyle method).
In the middle of that tradition, Cregger argues that zombie movies should be thrill rides that act like haunted house movies.
Resident Evil isn’t going to end up an awards season player like Weapons did, but it isn’t operating in that lane; it is going for the Friday night and pizza crowd.
90 minutes of scares, laughs and gore, everyone leaves happy.
In that proud genre, Resident Evil is a great addition to the roster.