Thank you Mr Cregger.
Plot
Follows a hapless courier tasked with delivering a package to a remote hospital. He soon finds himself caught in the middle of an outbreak and must fight through hordes of mutated creatures to survive.
The Good
Zach Cregger gives the franchise an actual distinct personality.
Austin Abrams is excellent.
The horror and comedy balance each other really well.
Some of the jump scares work well enough.
The creature effects and gore.
The snowy setting.
The Bad
The final act gets a little too excessive.
Some characters don’t get enough time to make much of an impression.
My Thoughts on Resident Evil
Zach Cregger Finally Gets Resident Evil Right
There is something I think is almost funny about how well Zach Cregger fits Resident Evil, because his movies have always had a dark little sense of humor hiding underneath the horror, which works ridiculously well here because this is a franchise that also needs to remember that horror can also be fun, something it has often forgotten.
Cregger also doesn’t treat the material like some sacred piece of horror history, but he also doesn’t turn it into a dumb monster movie either, because Cregger knows exactly when to let a scene breathe, when to make something funny, and when to suddenly shove something horrible into the frame.
It also helps that the movie has an identity of its own too - this is the eighth Resident Evil movie and the second attempt to reboot the series, and Cregger clearly had his own ideas about what this world should look like, and thankfully he gets to make those ideas.
Austin Abrams Is a Great Resident Evil Lead
Austin Abrams has this wonderfully awkward quality here that makes his character feel like someone who actually has accidentally wandered into a situation that is several hundred levels above his pay grade, where he spends a lot of the movie looking genuinely horrified by the things happening around him, which is a compliment FYI, and Abrams gets a lot of mileage out of something so simple, yet something simple that could have come across incredibly badly.
His comedy works particularly well too, because he doesn’t seem like he’s trying very hard to be funny - there is a dry, slightly pathetic quality to him, and I found him quite entertaining at times.
The Horror Actually Has Some Teeth
As I said above, Cregger is someone that has a really good understanding of how long you can leave a shot sitting there before you starts wondering why nothing has happened yet, and he uses that patience against you so well in his movies.
Some of the scare attempts are simple enough here, but the timing is also good enough that they work fine for this kind of film, and the actual creature work is good as well, with plenty of blood, some unpleasant transformations, and several things that look like they have been assembled by somebody who had a particularly bad day at the anatomy department.
The movie doesn’t rely entirely on digital effects though, which was good because Resident Evil can easily become silly when the things start looking like video-game characters wandering around a live-action set, but the movie generally avoids that problem.
Horror and comedy existing in the same scene can certainly be hard to pull off, but Cregger never seems worried that a joke will somehow ruin the horror, because sometimes the joke makes the next moment work even better, where laughing when you’re uncomfortable is a perfectly reasonable response to being surrounded by horrible stuff.
It Feels Like Resident Evil Without Being Trapped By It
This is always the worry with video-game adapations, but Cregger has spoken in interviews about how he isn’t here to please anyone, and has his own vision, which is handled better than I expected.
The movie clearly understands the appeal of things features in the games, but it doesn’t constantly point at them either, as I think that would have gotten old very quickly, but Cregger lets those elements become part of the movie’s world.
There are plenty of little details for fans to pick up on, but at the same time, the film doesn’t require a Resident Evil education to function - visually the movie looks great too, and the decision to put so much of the movie in a cold, snowy environment helped give it a different visual identity that comes across well on screen.
The Third Act Gets a Little Carried Away
The final stretch was where I felt some of the earlier control starting to slip, as things started to get a little bit ridiculous at times, and while some of that is absolutely part of the fun, I preferred the sections where Cregger was working with smaller spaces and simpler ideas.
There is a point where the film seems to decide that if one horrible thing is good, then several horrible things happening at the same time must obviously be better, and sometimes it is, but sometimes it just makes everything slightly harder to appreciate.
But Cregger has made the familiar entertaining again, which was enough for me.
Final Verdict
After eight movies, Resident Evil finally feels like a horror franchise again instead of simply a franchise that happens to contain monsters.
Well done Zach, well done.
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