When Capcom released Resident Evil for Sony’s PlayStation in 1996, it was widely praised for its cinematic atmosphere. Even today, it’s hard to make a video game as truly scary as creeping through the biohazard-zombie-infested haunted house in Raccoon City felt 30 years ago.
Resident Evil has always straddled the line between video game and movie. The original was loosely based on a Japanese haunted house movie from 1989 called Sweet Home, which had also inspired a Capcom video game. And while Resident Evil was followed up by six sequels and countless updates and mods on various gaming platforms, the film franchise it inspired is arguably even more popular.
Director Paul W. S. Anderson was convinced the game would make a good movie after playing it obsessively for days. His 2002 film had very little to do with the familiar characters of the game, besides the whole “advanced bioweapon leaks from a lab and creates monsters” thing. What it did have is Milla Jovovich, the Ukrainian-American star of The Fifth Element who would go on to become the highest-paid model in the world — and who eventually married Anderson. For 15 years and six films, Jovovich blasted and chopped her way through rage zombies and tentacle monsters, to steadily diminishing artistic and financial returns.
Enter Zach Cregger. The comedian turned horror director, riding high off of last year’s sleeper hit Weapons, got the job to reboot Resident Evil. He did it without the heaping helpings of Jovovich which attracted a generation of young men to the franchise. But if the guy sitting next to me in the theater who kept turning to me unprompted to say, “This is just like the game!,” is any indication, the lack of fresh cheesecake is not an issue for the core audience.
Instead of the hyper-competent covert operative, Cregger’s new protagonist is Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier whom we meet wandering through a Colorado trauma ward trying to deliver an organ to a transplant surgeon. He is trying in vain to get someone to sign off on the delivery when he is approached by another doctor who offers him double his usual rate to deliver a rush package to the top floor of the hospital in Raccoon City.
Turns out, he can use the extra money because his unseen girlfriend (Sara Paxton) has just discovered she is pregnant. Their phone conversation turns heated as Bryan tries to drive through a blizzard on the road to Raccoon City. In the first of the film’s many jump scares, a woman (Andrea Miltner) runs out onto the road and is promptly run over by Bryan. When he follows her bloody footprints into the woods, he discovers that she is not dead, but seemingly dazed from her injuries.
Since he’s already heading to a hospital, Bryan decides to take her with him. But once he gets her buckled into the car seat, her behavior becomes even more erratic. While he tries to sheepishly keep her in the seat, Bryan starts swerving all over the icy road and gets pulled over by a sheriff (Johnno Wilson). The sheriff is suspicious of everything Bryan says, but since he is legitimately on an emergency mission and he is heading towards a hospital with the woman he ran over, the sheriff agrees to help him get there first and then sort it out later.
Since Bryan’s job is only transporting parts of people, not whole patients, in his ancient Subaru, the sheriff agrees to take the wounded woman with him in his patrol car. But they’re not on the road for very long when the sheriff’s squad car runs off the road and flips over. The woman, Bryan finds out, is infected with the very thing that Bryan is carrying the cure for.
Hiring Cregger to helm the reboot turned out to be a very good choice. Nobody can accuse him of being a filmmaker who is using horror to explore deep ideas. But what the director lacks in cinematic ambition he makes up for in execution. Cregger never met a jump scare he didn’t like, and his commitment to recreating the feel of playing the old-school Resident Evil games extends to point-of-view shots with a shotgun intruding into the frame, first-person shooter-style. Like Weapons, this Resident Evil is good, clean horror fun — if by “clean” and “fun” you mean “bloody” and “terrifying.”
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