(2.5 stars)
Zach Cregger’s “Resident Evil” is a well-crafted, gorgeous thrill ride. But it left me with a bitter, empty aftertaste.
That’s not because it departs from the lore of its source material, my favorite video game series. Besides zombies, its monsters and story are largely original. It just misses something fundamental about them.
Resident Evil stories are about saving the day, throwing people against overwhelming horrors only for them to survive through courage and a limited amount of ammunition. Without spoiling the ending, Cregger’s script arrives somewhere much bleaker. There’s a mean streak running through the thing.
Austin Abrams is likable as Bryan, a courier whose dumb decisions have a habit of blowing up in his face, but he is the only character allowed any room to do anything. Everyone else is either a victim, an expendable exposition dump or a stand-in for a bumbling corporate America too stupid and selfish to understand the disaster it created. Sometimes it’s all three, and the film has no sympathy for any of them. Because of this, I never felt like I knew this world or understood the stakes.
Bryan is the audience surrogate, and sometimes his humorous reactions hit. I loved when the film pauses the action so Bryan could “heal” with some milk and cereal (the “Life” brand of course). Other times, Bryan becomes too much of a delivery mechanism for relatability than his own character.
Tempted by the double pay that comes with delivering a medical kit in the middle of a blizzard, Bryan quickly runs into his first zombie and hurtles into a nightmarish 90 minutes of nonstop frights. Here, Cregger is much better at re-creating the experience of playing a horror video game.
One terrific sequence has Bryan circling an overturned car to escape a zombie, exactly the kind of ridiculous strategy that serves players. Watching him desperately rifle through shelves for bullets as danger approaches turns a familiar game mechanic into genuine tension.
And the movie looks terrific. Setting it in a snowstorm is an inspired departure, giving beautifully lit set pieces and frighteningly designed creatures identities of their own.
“Resident Evil” is almost great. It’s a clever (if heavy-handed) metaphor for Cregger’s own fears for fatherhood, but its fatalism goes down like a bitter shot. Strangely enough, it might have been better as a video game.
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