Joel on Film

Around the third time co-writer/director Zach Cregger frames it to be so is when we realize that Resident Evil, the second attempt to reboot the film series that ran for six installments (following an incomplete-feeling first attempt in 2021), is meant to be a comedy. The protagonist of the screenplay, written by Cregger and Shay Hatten, is just a regular guy, trying to deliver an important package to an isolated hospital way the heck out in god-knows-where. He’s got no idea what he’s doing in almost any moment, and the undead, tendril-possessed beings that keep coming after him are sight gags for us to laugh at the sight of them.

Since movies can always be more than one thing at the same time, it should be said that this is also a crackerjack hybrid of genuinely unsettling horror and quite propulsive action, handled by the filmmaker in such a way that we’re able to appreciate some of the elegantly devised tricks he’s got up his sleeve. Sometimes, we receive a jump-scare of the good, old-fashioned variety of slow-build misdirection and a slimy or gory thing jumping out from just off-frame. At other times, though, the jump-scare happens right in front of our eyes, such as a moment with an angry but otherwise unassuming dog, from whose snout emerges, well, something unexpected.

It’s a neat trick in a film filled with them, ratcheting up instances in which deliveryman Bryan (Austin Abrams) can elicit a scream of terror that is never not funny. Those screams begin early on, as Bryan drives on a dark and stormy night, through an ice storm, and on a dangerously icy road toward his destination. To be honest, his mind is not totally on his task, considering his girlfriend has just announced she’s expecting a child and the two of them have different ideas about what that means in the short term.

His distractedness and the speed of his travel cause him to ram directly into a woman who emerges from the depths of the mountain forest—emerges from absolutely nowhere, already rabid with nervous energy before the accident leaves her a bloody, but still alive, mess. Bryan’s fumbling attempts to save her, which involve just driving to hospital he was already delivering his last-minute package to, attract a passing patrol officer. Let’s just say that things don’t go well for the cop, either.

What follows leaves Bryan without a car, without cell service, and with only a nearby farm, which is oddly deserted except for that dog, on which to find a working phone and maybe some idea of how to move forward with his delivery. It’s also the start of a relentless thriller, full of bloody surprises, a minor revelation hiding inside that package to be delivered and, perhaps, a slightly less ambitious climax than what precedes it. The whole thing is giddily entertaining, in large part thanks to the actor on whose shoulders all of it falls.

In other words, Abrams is exceptional here in the smallest details as a basically good guy who gets caught up in something far, far over his head and beyond his ability to deal with it. Now might be a good time to remind potential viewers, as if they didn’t already know, that this is also technically an adaptation of a long-running video game series—at least, indirectly and involving in sort of an incidental sense a corporation with a familiar name and mandate. We get a bit of that here with the involvement of characters played by Paul Walter Hauser and Kali Reis, who arrive in the middle of all this to provide a little exposition before exiting rather punctually.

Through it all, Abrams retains all the faculties of a guy just bumbling his way through a survival scenario in the middle of a nightmare. There’s the way he mutters to himself as a way of keeping calm to the inspired bits of sly physical comedy that arise throughout, and a running bit involving, seemingly, every car in whose driver’s seat he finds himself is very funny, as are a couple moments where he underestimates the solidity of a padlock. It’s unexpectedly emotionally precise work at the center of what becomes a rotation of goo and gore, leading a climax that is, on the whole, perhaps less ambitious than what came before.

Maybe that’s a little bit by default, because, after all, the narrative here is sort of required to address its video-game origins, which it does in a sequence where Zach Cherry shows up as the head of a secretive laboratory inside the hospital building. It’s another showcase of goo and gore that ends—rather abruptly, with a particularly hopeless but still darkly funny close-up that either promises a sequel or suggests something darker—this new Resident Evil, and that’s pretty much exactly what one wants.

Rating: *** (out of ****)