RESIDENT EVIL Review: Zach Cregger Brilliantly Reimagines the Decades-Old Series for Our Discontented Times

After 25 years, seven films, an animated series, and even a live album, it took Zach Cregger, the writer-director behind back-to-back horror standouts, Barbarian and Weapons, to properly adapt Resident Evil, CapCom’s survival-horror videogame franchise, into a live-action film that captured the essential elements that made the CapCom series not just playable, but re-playable: Not just the survival horror elements, of course, but more than that, the unrelentingly suffocating, claustrophobic mood, the personal stakes (survive or die), and the aptly named Umbrella Corporation as a placeholder or symbol for a government-iindustrial alliance that poses a literal existential threat. 

 

That's not meant as a knock, of course, on the commercially successful, if otherwise dismissed, six-film series starring Mila Jovovich and (mostly) directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (Monster Hunter, Soldier, Event Horizon), her partner in life and on film. It cornered the market on science-fiction/horror with a decidedly action-oriented bent, emphasizing slick, surface-deep visuals, and most importantly of all, Jovovich doing what she did (and still does) best: Balletically performing all manner of seemingly life-threatening stunts, often in pace-deadening slow-motion, while she dispatched any number of haphazardly conceived, indifferently rendered mutated monsters, zombies, and other biological hazards. By most definitions, Jovovich's onscreen heroics qualified as “cool,” but betrayed both the premise and the promise of the videogame franchise. 

 

That series certainly had entertainment value, but little of it directly — or even, indirectly — related to what made CapCom’s videogames perennial winners: pure, unadulterated horror, the kind of horror that puts the fear of God (or like-minded deity) into the minds of true believers, agnostics, and atheists alike; the kind of horror that worked its way under your skin into a maddening itch you couldn’t scratch; and, ultimately, the kind of horror that put your mind into permanent dread mode, fearing whatever scientific mutation popped up around the next corner. 

 

Leaving the Jovovich-Anderson collaboration behind in the past where it belonged, studio execs gave filmmaker Johannes Roberts (Primate, The Strangers: Prey at Night, 47 Meters Down) the chance to write and direct Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, five years ago. Not surprisingly, it failed to engage moviegoers, gamers, and critics. To be fair, its release during the COVID pandemic didn't help. Luckily for us, if not for everyone involved in Roberts' ill-fated reboot, Cregger was just getting started as an A-list horror filmmaker, first as the writer-director of Barbarian, a surprise box-office hit in 2022, then last year with the Oscar-nominated Weapons.

 

In turn, the financial and critical success of his previous films gave Cregger the rarest of opportunities, not just to pick his next project among a handful or more offered by studio execs, but a degree of creative control rarely seen in franchise filmmaking: Simply put, Cregger got the chance to make the film he wanted, and it’s everything Resident Evil fans have been waiting to see and hear for a quarter of a century. 

 

Cregger’s adaptation smartly leaves well-known videogame characters, and with them, any memories, faded or otherwise, of their previous live-action appearances, behind and instead centers on an entirely new character, Bryan Hodukavich (Austin Abrams), a self-described “glorified PostMates delivery driver” (aka, a medical courier), on an increasingly frenetic night of the soul (his), first through the heavily-wooded, snow-covered countryside outside of Raccoon City, and later, in Raccoon City itself, after the initial outrbreak of the fast-mutating virus runs riot through the city’s population, leaving Bryan to navigate the pre-apocalypse as his personal life disintegrates off-camera (a soon-to-fail romantic relationship). 

 

Keeping the exposition to a bare minimum while keeping Bryan, an everyman equal parts inept and lucky, front and center, not to mention running, stumbling, and bumbling his way through the pre-apocalypse, usually with a stream of expletives at the ready, pays off brilliantly from the get-go through the final credits an all-too-brief 90 minutes later. Cregger puts Bryan through a virtual gauntlet, including but not limited to, roadside accidents, slightly menacing, if overmatched, sheriffs, a farmhouse filled with gruesome surprises, a “save” or respite from the mutant monsters lurking in the woods (it proves temporary and illusory), and eventually, if not finally, another expletive-filled walk up 28 flights of stairs where the recipient or recipients of the delivery await, and possibly, Bryan’s salvation (earthly, if not spiritually) beckons along with a much-needed power nap and a change of clothes. 

 

Barbarian and Weapons both stood out above other horror films for a variety of reasons, starting, but not ending, with Cregger’s subversive approach to familiar genre tropes, masterfully upending them in a seemingly never-ending series of shocks, scares, and above all else, laughs. That singular mix of horror and humor continues in Resident Evil, mostly through Bryan’s twitchy responses to the absolute chaos unfolding around him. Bryan makes for a surprisingly engaging guide to both sides of the apocalypse, pre- and post-, and his everyman struggles as a lowly cog in a woefully unbalanced socio-economic system meant to keep all but a few down and the rest fodder for experimentation, exploitation, and eventually, disposal. 

 

Resident Evil opens theatrically on Friday, September 18th, via Sony Pictures Releasing. Check the official site for showtimes.