Game On: Resident Evil (Dir Paul WS Anderson, 1h40m, 2002)

It was only a matter of time in a videogame season before we encountered the video game movie Kurosawa, its Bergman, its Welles, the great auteur of videogame movie cinema. For certain film aficionados, this is Uwe Boll, a director who, via liberal use of a now closed German tax loophole, and pure, and admittedly admirable bloody determination, as well as challenging critics to boxing matches and briefly retiring to run a restaurant, has cornered the market in adaptions of cheap schlocky videogames like Postal, Alone in the Dark, and its ilk. The Boll process, and this does feel like some industrial by-product with all of the health risks and none of the consumability, turns said games into cheaper, shlockier, and yet surprisingly lucrative quasi-adaptions that often have little to do with their source material and who collectively bend the term "so bad they're good" to breaking point. 

Boll at least knows what his role in cinema is, a latter day Roger Corman, auteur theory running its course, a mirror held up to reflect the crass violent, profane world of lesser known videogames back at an often wildly amused audience. Boll, at least, is not Paul WS Anderson, a director, who like Boll, largely has an oeuvre of video game adaptions that stretch that word to breaking point. Alongside such cinematic feculance as the less-than-sum-of-its-parts Alien Vs Predator and needlessly remaking Paul Bartel's Death Race 2000 with Jason Statham, Anderson's filmography consists mostly of videogame movies. Alongside the so-so but highly lucrative Mortal Kombat (1995) and the less faithful adaption of beloved Capcom franchise, Monster Hunter (being beaten by, of course, Tár (2023)), is Paul WS Anderson's biggest "gift" to gamers and filmgoers, the Resident Evil franchise. 

It's difficult to know where to start with Anderson's version of Resident Evil: For a start, Anderson doesn't seem very interested in the franchise beyond its vague outlying features, adapting it as mix of Romero social commentary, paint-by-numbers writing - not a single character from the games appear till the second film in the franchise, and most are there just to gawp at Alice (Milla Jovovich, who would marry Anderson after the third film in the series) doing "Action Heroine 101" scenes - and teenage fever dream of attractive women doing "kick-butt" type things against CGI ghouls to loud industrial rock - the first film alone features 'mad at parents' stalwarts Slipknot, Rammstein, Fear Factory and so on, whilst Marilyn Manson joins Marco Beltrami of Scream fame on sub-John Carpenter atmospheres.

The first film underlines the problems with the franchise in general adequately: this is without going into the long gestation of a Resident Evil film, including by George A Romero himself, to the degree an entire documentary exists covering his attempts. Paul WS Anderson is not overly concerned with the events of a game in particular, jamming together disparate parts of Resident Evils 1-3, and occasionally adding a whole organisation, or concept from the games, chief of which are the nefarious Umbrella Corporation, and their creation of the dangerous and highly infectious T-Virus; in fact these are almost the only elements that remain from the games, aside from a small handful of esoteric references. What Anderson adds in essence is a horror movie by rote. 

Following a terse and at least for Anderson, remarkably well-shot sequence in which a thief releases the T-Virus and thus dooms the staff of Umbrella, so we are introduced to Alice, suffering from amnesia, who is swiftly bundled into a mission deep into the bowels of the Umbrella facility codenamed the Hive. Along for the ride, alongside fellow amnesiac Spence (James Purefoy) and cop Matt (Eric Mabius), are a squad of soldiers whose main purpose, aside from Michelle Rodriguez' gritty squaddy, seems to be cannon fodder, as the dual threats of the restless, and rather perfunctory undead, and the murderous, and entirely original to the film series Red Queen, an AI that oversees the Hive, and voiced by child actress Michaela Dicker for the main purpose of being, presumably, scary. There are the usual, tired - even in 2002 - bevvy of jump-scares and occasional atmosphere - most of it by capturing the same eerie camera angles and shot composition as the videogame, the only point where cinematographer David Johnson feels like he had any effect on the flat and dull visuals of this film.

These, like moments in the film taken from the game, few and far between. There is little style, little presence and little menace to the film; like the unfortunate victims of the Red Queen, the film also suffers from a complete lack of atmosphere, and much of its setpieces are demarcated only by a change in soundtrack, much of which fades into the industrial-ambient mush of the score. Resident Evil is not scary so much as it is a film absolutely convinced it is, its zombies neither relentless or particularly dangerous, and the monsters of the franchise only briefly feature in little more than a cameo, its threat fangless and neutered despite its R-rating - for a franchise famed for its pseudogallio gore, including chainsaw wielding maniacs and some of the most nail-biting sequences in gaming, Resident Evil falls painfully short of capturing this energy. 

What is left, in a horror movie that is neither frightening nor viscerally bracing fun is dated-on-release softcore titillation on the part of Jovovich -  incidently spending much of the film in a red dress and not much else - who wakes up naked twice, presumably for the benefit of the male teenage audience that arrived late, occasional pseudo-feminist action gal stuff from her and an undercooked Rodriguez, and a film rattling around in search of a point among occasional moments vaguely associated with the videogame series. No wonder it got five sequels. Even when compared to the enjoyably daft low-budget Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, helmed by killer monkey movie Primate director Johannes Roberts (incidently costing $10 million less), it's a shallow attempt to capture the series.

At every level of being a cinematic adaption of the series, Resident Evil is a resounding failure and a disappointing one at that, an empty dull zombie groan from a shambling lumbering mess of a film. 

Rating: Avoid

Resident Evil is available to buy on DVD and BluRay from ‎Pathé and is available to stream in the UK from Apple TV

Next week, to Japan for our final level in this season, as Takeshi Miike adapts the wild and violent world of Tokyo gangsters in Yakuza: Like a Dragon