Producers: Robert Kulzer, Zach Cregger, Roy Lee, Miri Yoon, Carter Swan and Asad Qizilbash   Director: Zach Cregger   Screenplay: Zach Cregger and Shay Hatten   Cast: Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, Paul Walter Hauser, Johnno Wilson, Andrea Miltnerová, Will Merrick, Emily Piggford, Zoé Bellas, Chris Lew Kum Hoi, Griffin Newman, Magdalena Sittova and Shawn W. Loeser   Distributor: Sony/Columbia Pictures

Grade: C+

Zach Cregger’s is the best “Resident Evil” movie ever.  But that’s a very low bar, since the seven previous ones were all atrocious.  It’s an extremely canny exercise in comic horror, technically impressive and well very choreographed.  Yet it’s nothing more than an efficient cinematic roller-coaster ride, with plenty of exhilarating, stomach-challenging ups.  The downside is that there’s no surprise about where it will end up, however many twists are built into it. 

That’s the result of Cregger’s decision to make what amounts to an “origins” movie, though told from the perspective of a character new to the franchise, a scruffy, nebbishy fellow named Bryan (Austin Abrams) who unwillingly becomes the cog in a last-ditch effort to head off the spread of the t-virus inadvertently released by the Umbrella Corporation.  A medical courier who’s assigned to transport a parcel to Raccoon City on a snowy winter’s night, he doesn’t know that the bag contains the key to an antidote that will stop the spread of the infection.  But to deliver it, he’ll have to run a gauntlet of increasingly icky, menacing obstacles.

We meet Bryan as he’s delivering one medical parcel to a hospital, and taking the opportunity to pick up another though his car isn’t actually fitted for the ice-covered roads.  He’s also dealing with a crisis involving his girlfriend, who’s told him she’s pregnant.  In their phone conversations, she’s not satisfied with his attitude about how to proceed.  (This is a subplot that could easily have been excised without loss.)

But at least it explains his distraction when an apparently deranged woman (Andrea Miltnerová) jumps out in front of his car on the lonely road to Raccoon City.  He hits her, but not fatally.  Being an essentially nice guy he starts to take her to the hospital until the sheriff (Johnno Wilson) pulls him over.  The cop agrees to escort him and his bag to the hospital, and even to take the woman in his car.  But to Bryan’s horror the police car skids off the road and crashes, the cop dies, and the woman escapes; he eventually shoots her with the cop’s gun as she chases him maniacally. Obviously, she’s infected and zombiefied, though Bryan doesn’t know that yet. 

Then he walks to the only house he sees, a bad decision as he’s attacked, first by a dog that turns into a grotesquely tentacled, sharp-toothed monster and then by an infected resident, whom he shoots with a shotgun he finds, as he does the original woman who has come back to life and followed him.  Watching the corpses’ intertwining leads him to mumble the phrase that will repeatedly come to his lips, the immortal “What the f—?”

He eventually escapes back to the road after failing for the second time to shoot open a padlock (a joke repeated often) and finds cars, and an RV, crashed near a tunnel.  Inside the latter he finds an infected young girl, whom he’s forced to shoot when those ugly tentacles attack him from her leg.  Points here for Cregger’s willingness to off a child—always proof that a horror movie is serious. 

Shortly after, Cregger adds some characters, Umbrella folk.  Bryan’s picked up by a corporate exec (Paul Walter Hauser) and security guard (Kali Reis) who drive him into the city to deliver the bag to the Umbrella lab atop a damaged skyscraper.  Many more infected humans and deformed creatures are introduced along the way, including a bulbous Jabba-like figure in the sewer who proves pregnant, and both of his companions are dispatched.  But Bryan makes it inside the building, where he’s forced to navigate the twenty-eight floors up to the lab.  He finds it was unwise to ignore advice not to take an elevator during an emergency. 

But he makes it despite the grotesque beings confronting him in transit, only to have the medical bag quickly seized by Umbrella technicians led by Dave (Zach Cherry).  Unfortunately, that nasty scrape Bryan’s suffered on his arm proves their undoing, with Dave’s trembling assistant (Will Merrick) the last man standing, except Bryan of course. After a fashion, at least.

Cregger delivers all this in speedy, episodic form, sometimes collaborating with expert cinematographer Dariusz Wolski and editor Joe Murphy in crafting tracking shots that mimic the first-person graphics of the videogame but not being slavish about it, more often using visuals of a more conventional sort.  He’s fortunate to have Abrams as Bryan; a member of the ensemble in his last film, “Weapons,” the young actor manages to keep semi-goofy Bryan sympathetic even when he’s blowing away people in terror.  The rest of the cast is merely serviceable, but Hauser gets a few laughs as a craven corporate type.

Abrams’ real co-stars, though, are the creations of the effects and makeup departments, who have done yeoman work in confecting the various baddies he faces.  The main influence here seems to have been the fantastically grotesque creature effects in John Carpenter’s 1982 “The Thing,” a film which, in spite of its failure in original release, has become the seminal modern horror movie.  But Cregger’s monsters still lack the wonderfully anarchic ghoulishness of Carpenter’s. 

The visuals are overall quite fine, considering that filming in Prague probably gave production designer Tom Hammock fits in creating a convincing American landscape—and a persuasive Raccoon City.  They’re accompanied by a music score by Hays and Ryan Holladay that juxtaposes spookiness in the creepy scenes with unabashed vigor in the action ones, and an effective sound design that, for example, catches beautifully the crunch of boots on ice-covered snow. 

But Cregger’s “Resident Evil” has the same weakness that hobbled the prequel trilogy to “Star Wars”—it tells us in greater detail something we already know.  It’s not so acute in this case, as it concentrates on new characters, and the treatment isn’t the lumbering thing the trilogy was; Cregger is smart enough to keep the movie trim and swift, and the effects certainly meet the gore test.  But after the cleverness of “Barbarian” and “Weapons,” it leaves one asking, “Is that all there is?”

Incidentally, it’s been reported that after test screenings Cregger removed jokes from the film because viewers complained it was too funny.  One can only speculate about what was jettisoned, but what’s left certainly still qualifies as a horror comedy, though admittedly the humor is of a caustic, quirky sort.