Resident Evil review – Zach Cregger’s rebooted action horror is a wild rollercoaster ride

The Weapons director delivers a seat-edge thriller with a standout lead performance from Austin Abrams as an everyman navigating chaos

Typically horror fans react to blatant on-screen stupidity with vocal derision. Don’t go in there! Girl, get out of the house! Guys, ignore that distress signal! But genre aficionados may find themselves falling a little bit in love with Bryan (Austin Abrams), the hapless de facto hero of the new horror film Resident Evil. It’s not that Bryan is traditionally hunky, or even a caricatured version of a square-jawed warrior, like Bruce Campbell in his later Evil Dead outings. But Abrams is in possession of a Campbell-ish charm, even in the face of his character’s repeated blundering, as well as an everyman relatability that makes this wild carnival-ride movie play a little closer to the ground.

Bryan is a courier – a glorified Postmates driver, in his own estimation – who postpones the end of his shift to take one last night-time run, driving an important item from one hospital to another in a snowstorm without the proper tires or four-wheel drive. After all, the distance and urgency means double pay. When he hits a mysterious woman who emerges suddenly on to a slick road, he’s drawn into a hellish outbreak that will look familiar to fans of the Resident Evil video game series (or maybe the previous six-movie Milla Jovovich franchise, which apparently drifted afield from the games’ storylines).

The key to Abrams’s winning performance as a perpetual loser is in how the actor and cowriter-director Zach Cregger take care to show Bryan stumbling his way through sloppy versions of doing the right thing. When he hits the clearly zonked woman, Bryan attempts to take her along on his hospital run. When he’s quickly pulled over by a cop, he makes little attempt to weasel out of his situation, attempting to prioritize his medical task. The man tries, even if some of his efforts in certain areas are lamentably weak (supporting his unseen girlfriend in a non-outbreak-related couple crisis) or understandably incompetent (wielding a firearm against undead creatures). His oscillations between overconfidence and panic make him a particularly fresh point-of-view character for a zombie/monster movie.

In short, he’s not unlike a guy who’s been dropped into a video game before learning the proper controls – in keeping with Cregger’s reported desire to replicate the experience of the game without adapting any of its stories directly. Abrams manages to humanize this unspoken and potentially arch conceit of an avatar learning the rules as he goes. It’s tempting to compare his many scenes without other human characters to silent comedy – only he’s not quiet enough to qualify, unleashing a hilarious symphony of profane and frustrated muttering. At one point, well after his life has been endangered multiple times, he can be heard complaining about his wet socks.

Good as Abrams is, alone and when playing opposite skeleton-crew supporting cast, he’s not exactly a one-man show, either; the guy behind the camera is his constant scene partner. Cregger, who has become a horror brand name on the strength of the similarly inventive Barbarian and Weapons, orchestrates the mayhem with expert command of pacing, comic-horrific timing, and even that old standby, the lowly jumpscare. (There’s at least one genuinely masterful version here.) The movie’s comic side isn’t quite Sam Raimi broad (or bold), but Cregger’s sketch-comedy roots are just as delightfully visible here as they were in Barbarian, without the aid of that movie’s clever shifts in timeline or perspective.

Indeed, Resident Evil has a streamlined single-mindedness, and as it barrels through its gamified plot, the tension and entertainment value never flag. Cregger only falters in the tail end, and it’s more a sin of omission than a big misstep. Resident Evil flirts with becoming a full-on monster movie where its cinematic predecessors tended to keep circling back to zombie action (at least in terms of their horror elements; let’s not discount Jovovich’s action bona fides). Cregger’s monster-mashier shift is a welcome one, and presumably closer in spirit to the games. But he doesn’t bring the movie close enough to whatever line separates monstrousness and the humanity that might be lurking underneath.

It could be that there’s not supposed to be any – in which case the movie more or less just screeches to a halt before it gets too thorny. Weapons had a creepy, evocative aversion to simple metaphorical reads that ultimately increased its effectiveness; the same isn’t quite true here. Resident Evil foregrounds one obvious bit of character change for Bryan, but after doing a great job making us care about him for more than 90 minutes, Cregger seems to abandon him a few steps shy of completing any real journey. Is he awaiting a level up that never arrives? Hard to say. But maybe bringing a video game sensibility to the big screen while keeping any gamer cheesiness on the margins is journey enough.

Resident Evil is in cinemas on 18 September