El: Resident Evil Review

I’ve always hated Resident Evil. It’s the control scheme—the way that when you cross a boundary that triggers a camera change what direction you press to go forward suddenly changes. I get why it’s designed that way—it increases the sense of suspense by introducing little moments of panic. But I just found it obnoxious, and it gave me a low grade hatred of the entire series. So when circumstances conspired such that Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil was the best thing we could do for the movies this week I was not exactly elated.

But alas, our options for things we hadn’t already seen consisted of The Uprising, a documentary about doctors in Gaza that looked apocalyptically depressing, and some inspirational drek about a guy who biked from India to Europe for love. And at least  Austin Abrams, playing a gig worker medical courier, looked charismatic and entertaining, and the director was good.

Sure enough, Cregger does well with the assignment, finding clever ways of using camera movement and editing to evoke the sense of playing a video game. The opening sequence, in which Bryan moves through a hospital looking for whoever he’s supposed to deliver an organ to, is a quiet lesson in how the film will work, emphasizing the act of moving through space and looking into rooms. His timing and sense of how to pace a jump scare is immaculate, and he does a good job of balancing legitimate jump scares with comedic defusings of the tension.

Cregger’s use of comedy is, by and large, the film’s defining feature. The story is, as I understand it, a side story to Resident Evil 2. Which is to say that Bryan is pointedly not the hero of a Resident Evil game, but rather a slightly hapless character who doesn’t really know what he’s doing, especially when it comes to guns. He spends much of the film grumbling about being stuck in this situation. And plenty of the characters who surround him are similarly bumbling and doomed. Much has been made of the innate similarity between horror and comedy, and Cregger uses it deftly, oscillating quickly between the two modes in order to create uncertainty.

The result is a sort of exquisitely made avocado slicer or garlic peeler, in that you respect the craft without at any point having a reason why the thing should exist. Yeah, a horror comedy about a guy who works himself to death is probably the best thing you can do with a Resident Evil movie. But it’s sure as hell not the best use of Cregger’s time, or of yours.

Next week (so, um, tonight): Primetime