Resident Evil movie review: This joyride lives up unapologetically to its legacy - The Indian Express

Resident Evil movie review: If five words capture the spirit of this Resident Evil, they have to be these: “What is this sh*t now?”

Constantly hurtling and hurting, bustling and bursting, this adaptation of that much-filmed video game lives up unapologetically to its legacy. And, it happens to be quite a joy(stick) ride with Zach Cregger (Barbarian, Weapons) steering a very good Austin Abrams through a new-virus-outbreak hell.

Abrams is Bryan (Weapons), a courier guy delivering medical supplies, usually organs for donation. He enters a hospital while on the phone with his girlfriend, who we realise has just discovered she is pregnant. Bryan keeps talking of “false positives”, enough for that conversation to fall apart in an argument.

Cregger directs, and Abrams delivers, a boy-man who can’t believe how his night is turning out to be soon after that phone call. And after he accepts a last-minute assignment, with the lure of double the payment, to drive onto a mountain in a snowstorm to make a delivery to Raccoon General Hospital (linking it thus to the franchise, which saw its first video game release in 1996, its first movie adaptation in 2002, and gave us the inimitable Milla Jovovich).

Bryan is not brave, but his pluck is charming, and you have to admire how Cregger builds Bryan’s timeline level upon level, with each more challenging than the other even as he polishes his skills and acquires new weapons. Yes, just like in a video game.

Bryan’s constant chatter, with a spattering of honest abuses, could have sounded smug but is also surprisingly effective. There are real-life consequences here, and at the same time, as Abrams plays him, are there?

With the film almost a one-man show, there is little to do for the others. This includes Zach Cherry, playing a scientist who, with his white-bare-wall detachment, could have stepped out of Severance, the series which made him a name.

Since we know how the story goes, it ultimately comes down to the film’s ability to keep it rolling along with well-timed jump scares from infected zombies who bear deadly and never-ending tentacles. Cregger, also the scriptwriter with John Wick-regular Shay Hatten, largely manages this, with cinematographer Dariusz Wolski (The Martian) using the snow, lights and shadows to striking effect.

Does it all get a bit too much in the end, with the body, blood and flesh count piling, and streams of acidic vomit burning through concrete?

Well, you can’t say you were not forewarned.