I watched Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil last night with a friend of mine. I should say this up front: I am barely steeped in this franchise. I played Resident Evil 4 last year and Umbrella Chronicles on the Wii, but that is the extent of my hands-on time with the games. I know the broad strokes. Raccoon City, Umbrella Corp., the T-Virus, the outbreak, etc. Basically, I know enough to tell when a movie is using the brand as wallpaper.
Spoilers from here.
For about the first half, I actually enjoyed it. There is little story at first, and that was fine. It felt like a localized story in a much larger world where we get to see the dying city from the point of view of some dude just doing his job. The main character, Bryan is a medical courier played by Austin Abrams. He is supposed to move a package through the night, drop it where Umbrella wants it, and go home. He takes it. There’s some subplot involving his pregnant girlfriend which is never resolved and seems present only to give him some personality as we watch his journey unfold. And his night starts going to hell. On his way to Umbrella, he encounters a number of mutated zombies, one of which bites him on the arm.
Eventually Umbrella picks up the main character and dumps the entire plot on him in one car scene, and the movie completely changes its personality. From that point on the movie stops being scary and just devolves into shock-value goofiness. Bryan races toward his destination while the film keeps elbowing you. Look how deranged this is! By the last stretch, my friend and I were laughing at how stupid it got.
When Umbrella picks up Bryan, the movie looks ready to inject a black girlboss into the story. She gets in the car already in charge and talks down to the scientist riding with her. She keeps a cool head while Bryan looks lost. Then, for no reason at all, they stop for a woman being chased. Maxine steps out with a pistol and casually drops one infected zombie after another, glowing with the competent action-hero dynamics the current marketing department dreams about. Then she walks off-screen and dies. That is her whole arc. Subverted? Based? Hard to say.
Most of what happens next is padding and barely worth talking about once you know the rug pull.
Bryan journeys through a dying city, encountering and avoiding more mutant zombies. Eventually, however, he gets his package to the Umbrella lab and the scientists there cook an antidote on the spot. However, almost immediately after he hands it over, the infection catches up. He mutates in the room into a T-virus eyeball-tentacle thing, tears through the Umbrella staff, and the antidote goes off the edge of the building. Credits roll on a roaring mass atop the hospital as helicopters arrive.
The Umbrella people talk and act like they were written by Redditors and they all die like a slapstick reel. Bringing Bryan into that lab makes zero sense with a city of infected things right outside the door. But the movie, seemingly, papers over the hole by turning the scientists into silly billies, even while mutant Bryan is smashing them and tearing them apart.
If you already know what happens to Raccoon City, the ending clicks as a grim punchline. The outbreak is loose. The city is already dead. If you walk in cold on the series, you are sitting there going, “Wait. That was the point?”
Fans are going to be annoyed, and they have a right to be. This is two hours of a random courier fumbling through the snow, swearing like he is paid by the F-word. Where is Leon? Where is Chris? Where is Jill? Cregger has been open about that: He wanted to avoid telling stories the games already told. Okay, fine. That begs the question:
Why put Resident Evil on the poster?
Strip the title, the city name, and the corporation and this is a standalone outbreak movie about a delivery guy who dies on the job because monsters killed him. Attaching Capcom’s name implies a reason to follow this man instead of someone the audience already cares about. But the film never supplies one other than he has a pregnant girlfriend he wants to get back to.
Capcom has been remaking its Resident Evil games for a while now, but it has always left the core series continuity intact rather than wiping it for a fresh start every time. The 2002 GameCube Resident Evil rebuilt the 1996 original. Then came the Resident Evil 2 remake in 2019, Resident Evil 3 remake in 2020, and Resident Evil 4 remake in 2023. A Code: Veronica remake, titled Resident Evil: Veronica, is due in 2027 from the same team that did the RE2 and RE4 remakes. Even more remakes are in some stage of work, including another pass at the first game. Those projects exist because the old games still sell when rebuilt, and because RE2 remake became one of the biggest titles Capcom has ever shipped.
The movies are a different mess. Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich ran six films from 2002 to 2016 in their own universe. Welcome to Raccoon City tried a closer-to-the-games reset in 2021. Netflix also tried a series and the animated films did their own thing. Now Sony and PlayStation Productions have handed Cregger another live-action reset with an original nobody in the lead, ninety-odd minutes of runtime, and an ending that only lands if you already know the lore.
Point being: The games have been remade well. But the movies? They keep getting relaunched because each live-action reset dies on the vine before it can stick. Oh, and the logo still puts people in seats, of course.
If Cregger’s whole idea was to make a nasty little horror feature about a man who dies before morning, this movie excelled in its first half. However, the Resident Evil label is what makes the second half feel like a waste. You can skip putting a recognizable character on the screen, but you still need a reason the name on the marquee belongs to this story.
If you drop the logo, is this even a Resident Evil movie, or just another outbreak picture that borrowed the name to fill seats?
I struggled with the second half too. Funny how the games fumble the ball in the third/final act as well.
In 1998, Gus Van Sant created an extremely faithful remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. Van Sant’s intention was to adapt this classic using new technology, while respecting the same shots, angles, and dialogue. He wanted to remain faithful to the original film. The result was a box-office flop and scathing reviews, as it was seen as a lazy effort that simply rehashed what had already been done. But today, it seems that Van Sant’s work was anything but lazy and required not only a deep understanding of the source material but also the willingness to defy production codes imposed by his superiors. Today, it’s impossible for corporations to make a faithful remake of any audiovisual work they own; this applies to film and, most notably, to video games. Resident Evil and Silent Hill 2 is proof of that.