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Resident Evil review: The Boy Who Cried Wolfenstein

Jeremy BeckReviews
Austin Abrams in Resident Evil

Video games are designed to be played. Movies are meant to be watched. This distinction has thwarted many filmmakers who have attempted to translate the button-mashing activity of the console to the seat-reclining passivity of the multiplex. So when I say that Resident Evil, Zach Cregger’s new adaptation of the 30-year-old Capcom franchise, is probably the best video game-inspired picture I’ve ever seen, I’m not bestowing an especially high compliment (nor am I working with a significant sample size). As with many members of its subgenre, it’s deficient on (har har) multiple levels: organizationally repetitive, emotionally thin, and thematically vacant. But it does thread a delicate needle, paying tribute to the aesthetics of its source medium while also operating like a bona fide movie.

This is a matter of both structure and style. The plot of Resident Evil, which Cregger wrote with Shay Hatten (John Wick: Chapter 4), functions as a straightforward mission narrative. On a dark and snowy night, Bryan—a slow-witted courier played with dim-bulb charm by Austin Abrams—is tasked with delivering a precious medical artifact to the fictional metropolis of Raccoon City. His seemingly simple quest quickly escalates into a series of fraught, life-or-death predicaments as he arms himself with various weapons and is menaced by supernatural foes. These challenges, which broadly present an increasing degree of difficulty and culminate in a final confrontation (though the identity of the big boss may surprise you), tend to be logistical: climb a ladder, unlock a door, scale a building. You can practically see the life meter in the top corner of the screen. Read More

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The Uprising review: Rebel Goon, a Child of Shire

Jeremy BeckReviews
Andrew Garfield in The Uprising

The plot of The Uprising, Paul Greengrass’ intermittently absorbing, broadly turgid new epic, revolves around death and taxes. This is only fitting, given that the movie substantiates another of life’s inalienable certainties: Greengrass’ inability to craft a coherent action sequence. It’s been a decade since the English filmmaker’s work was widely viewable in American theaters—News of the World was a COVID-19 casualty, while 22 July and The Lost Bus have long since vanished into the streaming abyss—but that hasn’t sapped him of his, er, restless energy. The Uprising is his most quintessentially Greengrassian film since his catastrophic Jason Bourne: hectic, dour, unapologetically bludgeoning. There’s a late fight scene where two muscle-bound men attempt to drown each other in foul-smelling mud—a visual that often approximates the act of watching Greengrass’ movies.

Actually, that’s unfair. Greengrass’ agitated style isn’t to my taste, but it hasn’t stopped him from making some pretty good motion pictures (emphasis on “motion”). His first two Bourne sequels were admirably punchy actioners that balanced their propulsive momentum with streamlined storytelling, while his best film, Captain Phillips, benefitted from its contained setting, forcing him to channel his jittery instincts into dramatic tension. The Uprising, set in England in 1381, is a more sprawling piece of historical fiction—it purports to chronicle the Peasants’ Revolt in the wake of the plague—but there are times when it manages, however briefly, to sit still. Read More

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Labor Day roundup: Onslaught, Fall 2: Deadpoint, The Sun Never Sets, and Finding Emily

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adria Arjona in Onslaught; Harriet Slater in Fall 2: Deadpoint; Dakota Fanning in The Sun Never Sets; Angourie Rice in Finding Emily

Hollywood generally dismisses Labor Day Weekend as a dead zone—a dumping ground for thinly marketed fare that studios forgot to release in January. In its history, the holiday has hosted exactly one smash hit (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), while only two other films (The Equalizer 3 and Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake) have ever topped $20M for the Friday-Sunday window. This year was no different—the highest-grossing new release was By Any Means, which pulled in just $7.5M, and which I skipped on account of it starring Mark Wahlberg—but the September slate nonetheless provided a range of odd and diverse pictures. Only one is, y’know, good, but two others are at least worth seeing, and all four are conceptually worthwhile.

Onslaught. The only thing worse than the screenplay in Onslaught is the hairstyling. Adria Arjona, one of the most desirable women in the world, is afflicted with a tangled mane, suggesting that her survivalist heroine devoted all of her budget turning her mobile home into a roving armory and thus can’t afford a comb. Drew Starkey, the handsome actor who has recently engaged in steamy on-screen romances with both Daniel Craig (in Queer) and Anya Taylor-Joy (on TV’s Lucky), sports a blond mohawk that he appears to have trimmed with a cleaver. And Dan Stevens, who embodied aesthetic male perfection in I’m Your Man, is fitted with a frightening bald cap framed by tufts of white follicles. The movie places a handful of ordinary citizens in a nightmarish situation, desperate for deliverance, but what they truly need is less a savior than a barber. Read More

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The Dog Stars review: His Bark Is Worse Than His Blight

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jacob Elordi and his Belgian Malinois in The Dog Stars

It’s been five years since Ridley Scott made a good movie (The Last Duel), but that hasn’t stopped him from trying. Undaunted by age, the 88-year-old Briton keeps cranking out handsome, nobly ambitious period pieces: a biopic of a fashion designer (House of Gucci), a military epic about a tyrant (Napoleon), a long-awaited return to the Colosseum (Gladiator II). (IMDb currently assigns Scott to eight upcoming titles in varying stages of development.) Now he’s back (to the future!) with The Dog Stars, a somber post-apocalyptic thriller that’s temporally different from his recent work, but qualitatively similar. It occasionally approximates an interesting movie, yet it’s ultimately forgettable.

To the extent The Dog Stars resonates at all, it does so metatextually. Based on novel by Peter Heller (the screenwriter is Mark L. Smith, whose uneven résumé includes Twisters and The Revenant; Christopher Wilkinson receives a “writer” credit), the film takes place in a depopulated landscape whose remnants of civilization—dilapidated buildings swarmed by vines, highways littered with rusty cars—will appear familiar to viewers of dystopian fiction. But while the movie is appropriately spare with backstory—a virus spread, and people died—its fanciful premise is nonetheless unsettling, given that here in reality, our nation’s top health official is a worm-infested eugenicist whose mission is to eradicate vaccines. Earlier in August, the “sex purge” concept of One Night Only seemed less ridiculous than it otherwise might have; three weeks later, Scott’s vision of a world ravaged by a pandemic plays eerily like prophecy. Imaginary futures feel less distant than they used to. Read More

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Let’s Get Experimental: Her Private Hell and Motor City

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sophie Thatcher in Her Private Hell; Alan Ritchson in Motor City

Fifteen years ago, Nicolas Winding Refn improbably delighted audiences with Drive, a glittering, electronica-tinged jewel of a thriller about a wheelman mired in gangland savagery. Since then, the Danish provocateur has made three features, two TV shows, a handful of shorts, and few new fans. I haven’t seen all of Refn’s post-Drive output, but what I have watched—the films Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, plus the Netflix miniseries Copenhagen Cowboy—suggests the work of a postmodern imp concocting some sort of experiment in anti-entertainment. With perverse pleasure, Refn assembles the raw materials of putatively interesting pictures—vivid colors, gorgeous actors, shocking violence—and then scrambles them into final products that are dreary and charmless. He seems to fancy himself the cinematic prince of darkness, but his movies are less devilish than simply dull.

Her Private Hell, Refn’s latest piece of feature-length trolling, isn’t without its surface diversions. As befits the studio that distributed it, it supplies a good deal of neon—bright bursts of pink and blue slashing through its literal and metaphoric fog. The production design is, if not exactly legible, at least striking, with jagged plinths and infinite spires. The costumes are eye-catching, in particular a seductive red leather coat that seems intended to inspire fetishism. The movie might be appealing if it weren’t so insufferable. Read More

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