Review: RESIDENT EVIL

Bryan is a courier and he's late to deliver an organ for transplant to a hospital. On the way out and home he's accosted by a staffer who offers a very good payday on an emergency job. Bryan takes it. It's about to be a weird and rough night, to say the least. Welcome to the world of Resident Evil where the action is always on and lethal. I'm not going to describe the plot as it's too easily spoiled and this is one film this year that everyone who wants to be constantly engaged should see.

I'm of the demographic that should be into video games but I never caught the bug. In fact, I was such a wild larrikin back i' the day that I'd frustrate many a fellow student by refusing to play my side of whatever the game was by my opponent more than once who would angrily start playing for me. So, I neither know the game nor any of the movies made from it in the 2000s. What I knew about this film was Zac Cregger, writer and director.

I thrilled to his debut Barbarian with its constant switching and expert atmosphere. I stayed intrigued during Weapons. I didn't care about the video game origins of this one as I knew I'd be getting something that played to convention but welcomed its audience into its cleverness. Zac Cregger is clever. His comedian senses allow perfect timing of jolts and just the right amount of humour to extend tension. No jump scare or threat is without construction, however subtle, everything is earned.

This is a non-stop action movie but if you want subtext think of how every story with a rapid mutation plot is a story of reproduction. Bryan starts his journey with a flunked response to his partner's rightful demand to address their pregnancy. The phone call is interrupted by bad weather conditions which adds another point of anxiety to the already tense one of him getting through to deliver the package which probably is a life or death situation. And then you get the monsters.

Austin Abrams takes us with him on this nightmare ride and his Gen Zed exasperation endears him through every scene. He knows just about nothing but has to be ready for just about everything which stretches his responses from the kind of lifelong bystander to main character energy that (this is Zac Cregger) itself carries costs and hazards. If a video game is a voyage through puzzles and demands for alertness then that's what this is (for a comfortable ninety minutes) but it still feels a lot warmer than it needs to. As a moment of cinema this might even end up being my favourite movie this year, an nail biting actioner drawn from a console diversion. I think I like it even more for all that.