Search all you want, you will not find a more effective nor gloriously satisfying title card than the one that glows blood red from the screen in the new “Resident Evil” reboot. It lands stylishly late and announces the exact experience the director Zach Cregger is constructing.
As if it’s dropping us into the start of a video game mission, his opener foreshadows the distillation of a once forgettable franchise into a night of increasingly unhinged gaming checkpoints. They add up to maybe the most visceral, raucously entertaining thrill ride at the movies this year.
After seven movies adapted from the Japanese video game across some two decades, Cregger’s “Resident Evil” starts from scratch, following Bryan (Austin Abrams, in a star-making performance), a medical courier whose attempt to deliver a high-priority package to Raccoon City General Hospital leads him to encounter monstrous entities spawning from a recent viral lab leak.
We meet these terrors often from the vantage point of Bryan’s gun-toting sightline; ditching the shaky camera work, a hallmark of the zombie movie, this film instead bears the look and feel of a first-person shooter game. But there is also a more broadly kinetic, unnerving omniscience to the way Cregger’s camera operates in suspense, smoothly but firmly tugging us along to what’s around the corner.
It was potent in “Weapons,” Cregger’s previous film, and here it’s like we’re nervously moving a joystick to look around for what’s in the dark. Amid a newly booming era of video game adaptations, arguably no film has toyed with this technical form as effectively.
Cregger, in other words, constructs haunted houses that are tightly calibrated, but above all electrifyingly fun. That’s what you need for a brand meant to be experienced as pure zombie pulp. His reboot treats each set piece, scare and creature as a new exercise in surprise, while relentlessly building momentum around a hell that’s just starting to come into focus.
Yet the universe smartly starts small and keeps the perspective limited. It sticks strictly to Bryan’s view, and uses his unwitting innocence amid the constant ramp-up of bloody disaster to create an adrenaline shot of horror comedy.
It’s a thriller that’s as funny as it is jumpy, with a remarkable number of jokes rooted simply in Abrams either shrieking in fear or muttering with incredulity. Cregger weaponizes comedy not only as an irrepressible reflex, but as a tool: If horror is about tension and release, he sees the relief of a laugh the same way he might a scream.
But it only works because of Abrams. The movie is essentially a one-man show. He’s expanding on a skill set from his scene-stealing turn as a twitchy drug user in “Weapons,” but in “Resident Evil,” he is finally given center stage. Abrams plays comedic and emotional desperation with a deceptively fine-tuned subtlety — his act of survival is visceral and immediate, and by turns goofy and wry.
It feels like another joke that Cregger nestles into the heart of the whole affair: trading a hardened, zombie slayer for an elfin delivery guy who can’t seem to load a weapon. But then again, the movie is putting us directly behind the gun, and you’d be shaking too.
Resident Evil
Rated R for strong bloody violence, gore and language throughout. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters.
