Resident Evil

Based on the long-running video game series, Resident Evil follows an assortment of characters, including Kaya Scodelario’s Claire Redfield, Hannah John-Kamen’s Jill Valentine, and Neal McDonough’s William Birkin, as they’re forced to fight for their lives after a zombie plague descends on their small town. Filmmaker Johannes Roberts, working from his own screenplay, kicks Resident Evil off with a decidedly less-than-engrossing opening stretch that’s perpetuated by low-rent visuals and a paucity of engaging, ingratiating characters, with, in terms of the latter, Scodelario and John-Kamen generally unable to transform their thinly-developed figures into the commanding protagonists one might’ve anticipated. (It’s clear, ultimately, that Donal Logue’s scenery-chewing and completely captivating turn as a grizzled police captain remains a high-water-mark within the proceedings.) There’s little doubt, then, that Resident Evil improves substantially (albeit all-too-briefly) within its lively midsection, as Roberts has suffused the narrative with a handful of appreciatively larger-than-life sequences that prove fairly difficult to resist (eg an on-fire zombie strolls into a police station to the strains of a cheesy ’90s pop song, Logue’s character must defend himself from an undead dog within an empty garage, etc, etc). By the time the dimly-lit and mythology-heavy third act rolls around, however, Resident Evil has undone any previously-established goodwill and cemented its place as a woefully hit-and-miss adaptation that is, in the end, more miss than hit.

** out of ****