Hey, I skipped new articles here for two weeks for a very good reason: I was out of town both weekends when I would normally go to the movies, and the one movie I did see was a second viewing of Coyote vs Acme so my Looney Tunes-loving father could see the movie. That means I might need to do some catching up for stuff I missed, and to start, let’s go for the latest Resident Evil. Normally, I wouldn’t have much interest in a video game adaptation. Oh, sure, I do go see some, but I often don’t have much confidence in them, and I have yet to see a single, solitary movie based on this long-running video game franchise. Why bother?
Oh, Zach Cregger directed it. That’s it. That’s the only reason, He directed my favorite movie of last year, Weapons. That’s good enough for me.
Organ courier Bryan (Austin Abrams) is set to go home to see his girlfriend for an important conversation when he asked to take an unknown package to Raccoon City general in the middle of a blizzard in the mountains in a car that is not equipped for the weather. His trip is long, dangerous as it is, and will pay him double his usual rate. Along the way, he hits a woman who wandered into the road but doesn’t seem to be dead. Injured, silent, and bloody, but not dead. Being a decent human being, he opts to take her with him to the hospital.
To say that is Bryan’s first mistake would be a misnomer. Bryan is, unknowingly, driving into something where he has no idea what is happening and could very well get him killed. I basically only know the whole deal with Resident Evil thanks to cultural osmosis. I know there’s some kind of undead plague going on in there, the product of a lab and the Umbrella Corporation. But Bryan doesn’t know that. And therein lies the fun.
My general understanding is what Cregger did was, rather than adapt the plot of an existing Resident Evil game, he took the plot elements, created a new story, and stuck the Bryan character–played by one of his more memorable Weapons cast members–in the middle of it. Likewise, he made Bryan’s situation funny. Not laugh-out-loud funny for me, but amusing. He doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s just reacting to an increasingly weird and dangerous situation. he doesn’t know what he’s transporting. He doesn’t know what’s happening around him. He just doesn’t know what’s happening, and I only had a vague understanding of what was happening better than he did.
It’s also to Cregger’s credit that this movie is really creepy. Bryan is transporting his package in the middle of the night during a snow storm. There are a lot of dark corners all over the place where I often suspected something was going to come out, but then Cregger would pull something else out. That scared little girl covering her face? Yeah, it’s not what I thought it would be. It was that over and over again. Factor in a Paul Walter Houser appearance at the point where it might be about time to explain what’s going on, and I walked out largely satisfied. It’s not Weapons by any stretch of the imagination, but it was a fun popcorn flick.
Grade: B
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