An unexpectedly madcap comedy (Get it? MadCAP COMedy? Is this thing on?)
This weekend, director Zach Cregger (Barbarian, Weapons) brings one of the world’s most beloved video game franchises back to the big screen. Although a relative newcomer, Cregger, who co-wrote the screenplay with Shay Hatten, has quickly established a reputation as a fresh voice for horror, and been handed the keys to the proverbial kingdom.
Resident Evil has been a lucrative movie franchise, even if the results have been met with mixed reactions. The original 6-film run produced by Paul W. S. Anderson was a massive commercial success but criticized for being too action-oriented and for focusing on the parallel side story of an original protagonist, Alice, instead of the survival horror and familiar characters from the games.
On home video, a series of CG-animated films have served as direct tie-ins with the video game universe, but failed to be very compelling. Similarly, a 2021 big-screen reboot, Welcome to Raccoon City, was perhaps an overcorrection to the Alice hexalogy, much more faithful to the setting and characters of the games – particularly Resident Evil 2 – but lacking the massive sense of fun of either the prior films or the games that inspired them.
Cregger’s new film again attempts to reignite this storied franchise with the combination of high-end production sheen, splatter, and dark humor that have made him a fan favorite. And it works!!
On the one hand, of all the films it’s perhaps the most detached from the games, again focusing on a new side story set against the event of the Raccoon City outbreak. And while the early games set in this time frame featured specifically zombies as their most pervasive threat (even today, most casual observers probably think of Resident Evil as being about zombies, even though it has evolved beyond that), Cregger is more interested in showcasing the mutational aspects of the evil Umbrella Corporation’s experimental weaponry, typically reserved for specific “bosses” in the games and only expounded upon later in the series.
The film also eschews the setting of a massive underground lab – a familiar component of nearly every game – in favor of putting the Umbrella Corporation in a regular downtown office tower, which feels wildly off-brand, and coincidentally similar to the recent Korean film Colony which beat it to US theaters by just a couple weeks.
But while this may feels in many ways like a departure from the familiar expectations for the story of the Raccoon City outbreak, Cregger brings a really entertaining and frightfully funny winning formula to his take.
Our protagonist is Bryan (Austin Abrams), a dopey medical courier who accepts a job to deliver an emergency specimen to nearby Raccoon City. What he doesn’t realize is that a late-night drive through a snowstorm across the Arklay Mountains is only the beginning of his troubles, as his mission to deliver the medical McGuffin is beset by unimaginable horrors.
The biggest surprise for me was how genuinely hilarious this movie is. I was slightly worried that this might lean into extreme horror and end up a relentless bloodbath, but that’s not the approach at all. Instead, this shares a lot of DNA with Kafkaesque movies like After Hours, and is to a large extent a surreal comedy about someone experiencing the worst night of their life – which just happens to be the Raccoon City outbreak. Each new challenge and horror is presented as yet another situational roadblock for this poor dejected schlub who just wants to finish his job and go home to try to salvage his relationship with his furious girlfriend, who has just learned that she is pregnant.
If there was any confusion at all about this being a comedy, it was cemented for me when Paul Walter Hauser shows up as a dim-witted middle-manager employee of the Umbrella Corporation to provide exposition before making an abrupt exit.
I’m on record as a big fan of the original “Alice” series of movies. I really do genuinely love them, though for really different reasons, some of which are ironic. There’s a trend that develops in the sequels where each movie ends on a huge game-changing cliffhanger with no actual plan, then then next movie spends the first five minutes writing itself out of that corner and then veering into something completely different. That kind of nonsense is endearing to me because it’s silly fun.
But Cregger’s film is great on a completely different level; it’s genuinely a really amazing and accessible splatter comedy that keeps the the audience guessing, gasping, and laughing in turn.
This is an emphatic recommendation from me.
A/V Out
