As a general rule, a 4:1 or even a 3:1 return on investment receives applause, if not outright admiration, from studio executives, board members, and shareholders alike, but when the investment involves a storied video game-to-film franchise like Resident Evil, a different kind of accounting — one where a franchise isn’t solely evaluated based on spending, revenue, and profits — takes centre stage. Of course, box-office numbers matter, but so does the perception that every franchise, film, TV, and otherwise reaches a natural end, one where preexisting fans lose interest, and new fans fail to appear.
That conundrum faced studio executives once the Paul W.S. Anderson-Milla Jovovich Resident Evil series ended after six highly profitable, if critically derided, entries, and a modestly budgeted, mid-pandemic reboot four years later failed to revitalize the moribund franchise. But as with any form of corporate-controlled IP (Intellectual Property), Resident Evil wouldn’t end there. It’d go on (and on) until a suitably talented filmmaker, perhaps a filmmaker with two well-received, commercially successful horror entries to his name, like Zach Cregger (Weapons, Barbarian), stepped into the writer’s room and the director’s chair.
The concern, as always, was whether Cregger, regardless of his previous success, would be given relatively free rein to reboot Resident Evil without studio interference. While some members of the terminally online cognoscenti went into hyperbolic mode, it certainly qualified as a legitimate one. Luckily, though, it proved unfounded as Cregger’s take, brilliant in its simplicity (and vice versa), proves that, at least in Cregger’s case, re-adapting the Resident Evil franchise for the Trump 2.0 era, isn’t the career killer or career de-railer many suspected or feared, but the exact opposite.
Cregger’s Resident Evil centres on a brilliantly simple idea: Instead of adapting or re-adapting any of the main or even secondary storylines present in the long-running video game series, he centres the latest big-screen adaptation on the equivalent of a side story (a B- or even C-plot). The new entry follows a medical courier, Bryan Hodukavich (Austin Abrams), and his increasingly desperate, increasingly frantic quest to deliver an all-important, potentially world-saving package from one hospital to another located in nearby Raccoon City.
Video-gamers and fans of the earlier film series, of course, know that Bryan’s headed for a heap of trouble, much of it of the monstrously mutant kind. Nothing good comes out of Raccoon City, the focal point for the video games and the site for the Umbrella Corp (aka “Evil Corp”) biological, chemical, and medical experiments. A government-aligned, if not entirely government-funded corporation, the Umbrella Corp represents everything bad, no-good, and terrible about unsupervised, unregulated, unfettered corporations run amok.
Same as ever, but for Bryan, transporting the previously mentioned package means both double pay and, more importantly, the opportunity to dodge a heavy relationship talk with his longtime girlfriend, Michelle (voiced by Sara Paxton). When she gives him news he hoped not to hear, he reacts selfishly, tossing out the “your body, your choice” line to avoid discussing his feelings about the news or their relationship’s future.
That’s all background, though, to what happens next: Driving up a long, winding, snowy road in a car ill-equipped for the weather, a distracted Bryan runs over a dazed, bloodied woman who walks into the road. Although he pauses for a beat, Bryan does the right thing: He scoops up the woman, slightly more bloody and bruised, and gently seats her on the passenger side. He’s not exactly a good Samaritan, but it’s a clue, one of many, that despite his tendency to avoid responsibility, he’ll do the right thing when pressed.
The “right thing” gets harder with every subsequent encounter. A brief one-on-one with a local sheriff, Earl (Johnno Wilson), ends badly (for the sheriff). An attempt to get help from a nearby farmhouse instead unleashes Lovecraftian horrors that leave a perpetually stunned Bryan shaking in disbelief and muttering expletives non-stop. And that’s all before he somehow makes it to a Raccoon City in the middle of an outbreak. More monstrous mutants await Bryan, but inadvertently following the postal carrier’s mantra, nothing, not even snow, sleet, or multi-limbed, tentacled monstrosities, will get between Bryan and delivering that package to Raccoon City’s hospital.
At a slimmed-down, super-tight 90 minutes, including credits, Cregger wastes little time on exposition or backstory, either Bryan’s or Resident Evil’s, instead trusting his audience’s preexisting knowledge about the video game series and its media-related spinoffs or simply learning everything they need to know as they — with Bryan as the audience stand-in — go along. Once again, it’s a brilliant decision, simple, straightforward, and all the more effective storytelling-wise. Throwing an often frightened, often befuddled, almost always hilarious Bryan, a “glorified Postmates driver” whose only knowledge of firearms comes from video games, into the frenzied fray pays off viscerally, thematically, and narratively countless times.
As both Barbarian and Weapons proved, Cregger fully understands that horror and comedy aren’t opposed as much as they’re interrelated, less two sides of the same coin than the same coin seen from a different perspective. To borrow another metaphor, Cregger plays the audience like a world-class conductor leading an orchestra, making us laugh in shock one moment and shrink in terror the next. That horror-comedy mix brings another master of the hybrid form, Sam Raimi, to mind. For once, those comparisons are completely apt.
Raimi isn’t going anywhere. He’s still with us, of course, but in Cregger, he’s found a more than worthy successor, one whose subsequent filmography in the genre should put him among the all-time greats alongside Raimi, Carpenter, Cronenberg, and Craven.
Resident Evil opens theatrically on Friday, September 18, via Sony Pictures Releasing.
