Resident Evil Review: Zach Cregger’s Bloody, Chaotic Thrill Ride

Since Simon Pegg’s oblivious slacker made a Cornetto run amid the zombie outbreak in “Shaun of the Dead,” few horror heroes have been so spectacularly unprepared for the end of the world as Austin Abrams’ Bryan in “Resident Evil.” A hapless gig worker, Bryan is handed a last-minute delivery job: transport a top-secret package to a medical facility in the isolated mountain town of Raccoon City. He needs the money, so he presses ahead despite every glaring warning. His car is hopeless on icy roads, but that will not stop him. And, in a misguided act of civic responsibility, he even picks up an elderly woman after she crashes into his vehicle, buckles her into the passenger seat, and promises to take her to the hospital on the way.

Video game adaptations have stumbled for decades, but director Zach Cregger and co-screenwriter Shay Hatten appear to have found an answer hiding in plain sight. Instead of tracking capable heroes who expertly clear every obstacle, “Resident Evil” follows a man who seems to be controlled by a player with no idea what they are doing. The fun comes from watching Bryan make virtually every wrong choice available. Cregger borrows some visual cues from first-person shooters, yet this “Resident Evil” has more in common with a branching horror game such as “Until Dawn,” where seemingly minor decisions can decide who makes it out alive.

This is the disastrous playthrough in which logic is tossed aside with glee. Bryan enters doors that should clearly stay shut, offers compassion to infected people he should be avoiding, and disregards every instruction in the name of saving a few seconds or choosing the most convenient route. The result is stressful, ridiculous, and consistently funny.

Cregger’s “Resident Evil” is a comparatively simple take on the franchise. It is not a direct adaptation of any one game, and it does not feature familiar fan-favourite characters, though eagle-eyed viewers will find Easter eggs. The roar that greeted a typewriter during my screening suggested at least one reference landed exactly as intended. After Abrams stole scenes as James, the homeless burglar in “Weapons” — also reviewed by Looper — Cregger has built on the appeal of watching the actor clumsily tumble into a horror story without understanding what kind of danger he is in. An extended sequence in which Bryan breaks into a family home while travelling toward Raccoon City makes the comparable moment in the earlier film feel almost like a proof of concept.

Cregger clearly recognises that Abrams is at his funniest when panic has completely taken over. He has effectively constructed a “Resident Evil” franchise film around the slapstick possibilities of pitting that frazzled energy against swarms of undead creatures. The instinct to leave the genre machinery largely intact, trusting the mismatch to generate laughs on its own, pays off almost from the start.

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Abrams expands on the loose, slippery physical comedy he brought to his previous collaboration with Cregger. Bryan moves as if someone who has never touched a PlayStation controller is frantically working the controls. Cregger’s reputation as a horror filmmaker is well earned because of his appetite for the macabre, but “Resident Evil” is difficult to classify as straight horror. There are grotesque transformations and real momentum, yet each jump scare is carefully designed as a gag. We know Bryan is creeping toward something from which he should be fleeing. When the sound drops away, the sensation is less mounting terror than Cregger setting up a punchline.

The film occasionally asks viewers to take Bryan’s personal life seriously. As in the recent video game adaptation “Exit 8,” his ordeal begins alongside the news that his girlfriend is pregnant. Those attempts at emotional weight do not land, however, overwhelmed by a relentlessly propulsive plot that is deliberately built to prevent viewers from pausing to reflect. Bryan works much better as the embodiment of the least competent gamer in your friend group, producing noises in the face of terror that I did not know a human voice could make.

Coming hot on the heels of “Barbarian” and “Weapons,” two epic, multi-stranded tales that showed greater ambition than the horror comedies they were likened to, “Resident Evil” feels revelatory for the filmmaker in its stripped down, concise nature. At 95 minutes, there’s almost no fat on the movie’s bones (again, the emotional journey of the protagonist takes too much of a backseat to resonate), and even if this was a for-hire gig, it reveals a new side to him that proves he can offer up straightforward squeamish thrills with the best of them, without sacrificing his unique, blackly comic identity as a filmmaker.

Time will only tell whether “Resident Evil” is the greatest video game movie of them all, like the first reactions suggest – with such little competition on that front, it’s a conversation we don’t need to worry about having too soon after a first viewing, lest we overhype it too much — but Zach Cregger has done the best job I’ve seen of translating the experience of playing a video game and making it feel cinematic. There are no scenes that feel like characters are completing challenges to get to the next level, for example, but he does capture the panicked feeling of playing a horror game and only having a few seconds to work out how to tackle the obstacle in front of you. He doesn’t stop to ponder on the lore like Paul W.S. Anderson’s series of adaptations either; it’s designed as a kinetic thrill ride that moves before you have a chance to think about the bigger picture.

I’ve certainly made tactical errors that have killed off important characters before; “Resident Evil” is a narrative comprised exclusively of those worst-case scenarios, blown up to apocalyptic levels. Playing games can often be about gut feeling as much as forethought and skill, and with a character who is self-confessed to be “bad at guns” leading the charge as humanity’s savior (he makes Ash from the “Evil Dead” movies look like the hero he thought he was), we’re forced into watching someone who can’t think on their feet bumble their way to survival. It’s an absolute blast from start to finish.

“Resident Evil” lands in theaters on September 18.