Resident Evil Review: Zach Cregger Delivers A Bloody, Chaotic Good Time

Not since Simon Pegg's slacker hero in "Shaun of the Dead" went to the corner shop for a Cornetto has a horror protagonist been as ignorant of a zombie apocalypse and as ill-equipped to fight it as Austin Abrams' bumbling gig economy worker Bryan in "Resident Evil." Given the last-minute job of driving a top-secret package to a medical facility in the remote mountain town of Raccoon City, he ignores every warning sign in order to complete his task so he can get paid. It doesn't matter that his car isn't suited for driving on icy roads, he's determined to get there — and as a model citizen, he'll even pick up an old woman that ran into his car, fastening her up safely in the passenger seat to take her to the hospital while en route.

Many people have failed to make video game adaptations over the years, and director Zach Cregger (alongside co-screenwriter Shay Hatten) has worked out the magic formula that was staring us in the face all along. Rather than following competent heroes carrying out every challenge as planned, why not follow someone who seems controlled by a player notoriously bad at video games, and watch what happens when they make every bad decision possible? Although Cregger's film uses some of the visual language of a first-person shooter, his take on "Resident Evil" is closer in spirit to a decision-making horror game like "Until Dawn," where every incidental choice a player makes can determine how many characters survive at the end.

What we're seeing is the playthrough where all logic and common sense are gleefully thrown out of the window, where doors you shouldn't enter are walked through, kindness is extended toward infected characters that should be passed by, and every instruction received is ignored so the protagonist can save time and do things the easier way. It's as funny as it is stressful.

Zach Cregger's take on the material is relatively low-concept, not being strictly adapted from any single game in the series, and featuring no fan favorite characters — although there are Easter eggs, if the cheer that went up at a shot of a typewriter in my screening is anything to go by. After Austin Abrams stole scenes as the homeless burglar James in "Weapons" (that Looper also reviewed), where his character bumbled his way into discovering Aunt Gladys' (Amy Madigan) child-snatching spell, Cregger has expanded upon the idea of watching the actor clumsily prat-falling his way into a horror narrative, entirely unaware of the kind of movie he's in. There's even an extended sequence of him breaking into a family home on his way toward Raccoon City that makes the prior film's scene feel like a proof-of-concept.

You can tell Cregger sees in Abrams a comic actor who lands the most laughs when under extreme pressure, and has reverse-engineered an entire franchise movie around the slapstick potential that comes with throwing him against hordes of undead monsters. His instincts that this would be innately hilarious without even needing to tweak the genre formula pays off almost immediately.

Abrams' performance builds on the slippery physicality he established in his prior collaboration with Cregger too, perfectly embodying a character who moves like he's being manipulated by someone who doesn't know how to operate their PlayStation controller. Cregger is known as a horror director due to his taste in the macabre, but I'm not sure "Resident Evil" could easily qualify — it's got icky bodily transformations and driving tension, but every single jump scare is calculated to play out as a joke. We've seen enough movies to know Bryan is inching toward things he should be running away from, and there isn't sustained dread as the movie goes silent around him so much as there is a sense that Cregger is bracing for a punchline.

The movie does occasionally attempt to get you to invest in Bryan's emotional life — like another recent video game adaptation, "Exit 8," his nightmare coincides with receiving the news his girlfriend is pregnant — but these moments fall flat, lost within the driving propulsion of a narrative that doesn't want you to stop and think by design. He's far better as an avatar for the most inept gamer you know, making sounds with his voice when encountering terror that I didn't even know were humanly possible.

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.