‘Resident Evil’ movie review: 97 minutes is all Zach Cregger can spare for this monstrously good time

Account subscription benefits alongside Premium Stories, Editorials, Opinions and more. Unlock these with Subscription

I am of the firm belief that the subgenre of Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day movies belongs in the Top 3 genres ever devised in the history of cinema, because there is something endlessly entertaining about watching an ordinary person discover that a manageable inconvenience has metastasised into a full-scale indictment of their existence. Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is his After Hours , except Martin Scorsese ’s nocturnal tribulations in Soho have been relocated to Raccoon City, where the night keeps taking increasingly grotesque T-virus liberties with the human form.

Cregger could have found no better Paul Hackett for this ordeal than Austin Abrams, whose Bryan seems perpetually one minor inconvenience away from needing to lie down. He is a medical courier who takes an ill-advised final delivery through a snowstorm for some extra money, hits a woman with his car, discovers that she may be a zombie, gets stopped by a policeman, loses his car, and then spends the remaining 97-minute nightmare shooting at things with profound incompetence.

Bryan has the unfortunate occupational fatalism of a desperate gig worker, coupled with the survival instincts of an NPC whose principal contribution to the plot is usually a sad, little note explaining how he died. Cregger knows just how funny it is to perpetually keep him in that state, so every time Bryan acquires some semblance of control, the film periodically removes it again, usually by making him shoot at yet another comically indestructible padlock or whatever fresh biological nonsense Cregger has cooked up around the corner.

Abrams plays every stage of that humiliation with aplomb. It is genuinely difficult to think of another recent performance so completely calibrated to the specific idiocy of survival-horror. Most of his dialogue sounds like live commentary on his own impending death, with Bryan muttering and groaning to himself in consistent disbelief, making little verbal negotiations with the environment, screeching like a pterodactyl at every turn and attaching a charming succession of “ f**k”s to approximately every available noun, verb and conjunction since the English lexicon doesn’t quite contain the adequate vocabulary for what is happening to him.

The film had some serious franchise baggage to shake off. The six Milla Jovovich movies built their own action mythology around Capcom’s games for years, while Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City tried to steer the series back towards the first two titles. Cregger simply leaves most of that luggage behind. Leon, Ada, Claire and Wesker are nowhere to be found, and Bryan has absolutely no need to understand Umbrella’s sprawling corporate pathology before he can get through the next door. Some fans understandably bristled at that choice.

The funny thing is that Cregger seems to understand the Resident Evil games at the basest level of their most perversely specific habits.