RESIDENT EVIL
***
Directed by Zach Cregger.
Starring Austin Abrams, Paul Walter Hauser, Kali Reis.
Horror, US, 95 Minutes, Certificate 15.
Released in Cinemas in the UK on September 18th by Sony.
Hi, it’s me again! The film critic who is hopelessly out of touch with video games, here to review the latest instalment/reboot of the long running video game franchise. This is the one with the Umbrella Corporation, monster people and zombies isn’t it? It must be because George Romero was going to make a film out of it before Paul W. S. Anderson pretty much made a whole career out of the long running saga starring his wife, Milla Jovovich. After Johannes Roberts failed to lure fans back with his own reboot of the franchise back in 2021 we now find ourselves starting back at the beginning once again. This time however we have Zach Cregger at the helm, barely a year after unleashing his instant, Oscar winning classic WEAPONS, making this particular visit to Racoon City more enticing than ever before.
For someone like myself, being a fan of Cregger’s previous works, this is an already enticing prospect. For fans of the one time sketch comedian turned horror screenwriter/director and Capcom’s literal game changer this must be something else entirely. There are fans of the game however who bristled at the news that Cregger would be forging his own storyline set within the bio-plague ridden world, forgoing fan favourite characters such as Jill Valentine and Ada Wong, and choosing instead to focus on Bryan, a hapless young medical courier who soon finds himself in over his head when tasked with the delivery of a medical package for a hospital miles away in a certain city named after a certain mammal. While trying to negotiate the snow covered roads and deal with a life changing prospect over the phone with his girlfriend, a woman steps out directly in his path. From here, things quickly go from bad to worse to even worse than anything else.
Re-uniting with Cregger, after his funny turn as an addled drug addict in WEAPONS, Austin Abrams portrayal of Bryan makes for a very different horror hero. With his lack of firearms training and tendency to scream in short bursts, this is someone you would expect to find tormented in a Sam Raimi film and not the highly trained special agents and rugged cops of the games and the previous films. While this is a move that could rankle fans wanting and expecting a more faithful adaptation of the games it makes for perhaps a far more interesting choice for the audience at large, throwing us in alongside Bryan as he gradually discovers the full extent of the nightmarish and blood soaked nightmare he finds himself in. Clocking in at a swift ninety-five minutes, Cregger, along with co-screenwriter Shay Hatten, known for his work on the JOHN WICK sequels, fires up the pacing here, rattling his nervy hero on an increasingly nightmarish journey into Hell while delivering a number of impressively mounted set pieces along the way.
After the multi-character and time shifting narratives of Cregger’s previous films, this is a much more straightforward experience that does a fairly accurate job of game-playing that the other films, and most video game adaptations, forgo. With the camera often taking on Bryan’s first person perspective, whether in the middle of a quiet dread filled situation such as creeping through a stranded camper van or listening to a vast ream of plot exposition, the results prove to be a lot of fun with Cregger’s inventive direction never pulling attention to itself or coming across as clunky in any way.
As the film progresses however, the results do tend to become a little repetitive. The joke of Bryan’s poor firearms skills is hammered into the ground, while a farcical edge becomes even more apparent leading to a conclusion that feels both rushed and underwhelming. It is a shame because everything else that comes before works so well. The first act especially contains some of the most expertly executed jump scares of Cregger’s work so far, as well as some truly unnerving body horror imagery that is more than a little reminiscent of John Carpenter’s immortal classic THE THING, as well as what appears to be a nod to the nighttime forest sequence from Argento’s SUSPIRIA. That the music is also reminiscent of Carpenter’s own pulsing electronic scores seems to suggest that Cregger is also wanting to iron out his own influences cinematically as well as those of the console driven variety. At the same time he delivers some true nightmare fuelled imagery that really tests the bounds of how far you can go with a 15 certificate. While it may not match up to his previous works, it still easily manages to land itself in the sparsely populated end of high quality video game adaptations.
Iain MacLeod