I’m not going to claim to be some kind of expert on video game film adaptations – oh wait, I am. Having watched an obscene amount of these films, both Eastern and Western, animated and live action, I can confirm that creating an adaptation of a game does not seem to be easy. Until recently, the best films in the genre have been animated, such as the first few Pokémon films and Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva, or released only in Japan, like Takashi Miike’s Like a Dragon. Others, like DOA: Dead or Alive, Mortal Kombat (1995), and the original Milla Jovovich Resident Evil, have walked the line, being so campy and stupid they end up being a good time.
It’s only recently, with the Sonic the Hedgehog films, Exit 8, The Last of Us, and Five Nights at Freddy’s, that filmmakers have started to figure out how to make the concept of a video game work in a different medium. The crown jewel of this push is, of course, Amazon Prime’s Fallout series, boasting two incredible award-winning seasons with a third on the way. I find that Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil shares a lot in common with Fallout: both are part of the game universe’s canon but do not interact with story and characters from the game; both tell an original story that can be enjoyed and followed with no previous knowledge of the games; and both focus on what it feels like to play the game. This last component, I feel, is the key.
Director Zach Cregger (Barbarian, Weapons) said during the publicity cycle for Resident Evil that he wanted to truly capture what it feels like to play the games. He’s less interested in adapting an existing story, which is for the best – 2021’s live-action film Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City already did that, to pretty disastrous results. The things that make a game story interesting are not generally the same things that make it interesting in film format. Cregger has heartily succeeded there, focusing on simply making a good movie with the tools the Resident Evil franchise provides.
The film follows Bryan, a medical courier played by Austin Abrams (The Inbetweeners, This Is Us), as he navigates Raccoon City on the night the T-Virus escapes containment at Umbrella Corporation headquarters. First off, Abrams is brilliant in this film – it is his charismatic humor, endearing stupidity, and earnestness that carries the film through its best moments. Much like me playing any Resident Evil game, he’s very easily frightened, mostly incompetent, and reactionary. His constant muttering of curse words under his breath as he searches for bullets and misses three shots in a row was very familiar to me, especially from playing the newer first-person games Biohazard and Village.
Bryan is given a job for double pay to drive through a winter storm and deliver a mysterious medical cooler to Raccoon City General Hospital. He lies about having snow tires because he’s both in need of cash and is stalling talking to his girlfriend about pregnancy, which serves as the emotional core of the story. Unsure if he’s ready to be a father, he runs from his responsibilities straight into hell. One interesting thing about the film that makes it work so well is that Bryan is largely the only character in it – while Zach Cherry (Severance) and Paul Walter Hauser (Cobra Kai) have some great lines, no one but Abrams is on screen for 90% of the film. And yet, the film manages to keep you hooked on his (for lack of a better word) shenanigans.
A few monsters are featured in Resident Evil, but you won’t find the iconic ones like Mr. X, Nemesis, or Lady Dimitrescu in this film. Instead, the unnamed creatures in the film are inspired by the creatures in the games and expand upon the idea of what other creatures the T-Virus might have created that Leon and Jill never encounter. The stalker creature, which I’ve seen fans calling The Amalgamation, is definitely the scariest one in the film, as it keeps returning and, in one form or another, is chasing Bryan the entire duration of the film. This and the other creatures freaked me out to the point I had to shut my eyes a few times, especially the creature in the RV.
What really makes Resident Evil work with just a single character is how damn funny it is. I don’t think a single one of the jokes missed, and almost every one of them is down to Abrams’ physical comedy. The frustration with game mechanics like needing the diamond key for the diamond gate, or finding a shiny new gun and having no bullets for it, got me every time. I kept doing the Leo pointing meme in the theater, much to my fiancée’s annoyance (don’t worry, I was in the back row). What’s great is that I wasn’t pointing at a game character making a coy cameo, or some legendary late-game weapon; I was pointing at watching familiar game mechanics play out and inspire the same feeling in Bryan that they did in me while playing.
I will concede that the movie kind of falls apart in the last 15 minutes, but I also struggle to think of many horror movies that don’t. Regardless, it holds together really well, telling a complete story with a real emotional core, but leaving fans of the game series feeling like they just played one of the games for a two-hour session. Resident Evil embraces its video game-ness in the right way, not by shoving in references but by celebrating a real person’s love of playing the games. The “boss battle” in the elevator shaft was one of my favorite bits, and I could just see where the quick time event prompts would have been floating. It brought me considerable joy despite how bleak and depressing the actual story is. I heartily recommend it to all fans of horror movies and games!
Score: 8/10 – Excellent
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