In Review: 'Resident Evil,' 'The History of Concrete,' 'The Weight'

Resident Evil
Dir. Zach Cregger
94 min.

Video game adaptations have something close to a .000 batting average, because the two media feel fundamentally incompatible, like trying to jam an Atari 2600 cartridge in a PlayStation slot. The cutscene mythology of games are often too thin and superficial for a proper feature and there’s seemingly equivalent language to simulate the visceral kick of the gameplay itself. But hold onto the adverb “seemingly” here because co-writer/director Zach Cregger has finally cracked the cheat-code with Resident Evil, a robustly entertaining horror/comedy that leans fully into its video-game-ness. Rather than try to disguise its roots or cobble together episodic lore, Cregger locks into a single character’s perspective and follows him through different environments, each with escalating threats and possibilities. (The weaponry ramps up, too.) The mission seems to be “Let me show you why it’s fun to play this game,” and Cregger has the boyish enthusiasm and skill to make the game-to-screen transition look startlingly seamless. 

Part of the road map here leads through Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn, and Cregger’s first and best idea is to re-create Sam Raimi’s slapstick horror on a mammoth scale. As Bryan, the put-upon Bruce Campbell hero of Resident Evil, Austin Abrams (Euphoria) has a stoner/slacker appeal, combining an affable, slow-on-the-uptake personality with enough adaptability to keep viewers from wanting to scream at him for his mistakes. As he’s closing out his shift as a medical courier—a gig he likens to a Postmates delivery job and takes about as seriously—Bryan accepts a lucrative offer to bring a special package to Raccoon City General hospital, despite snowy conditions that he doesn’t have the tire chains to manage. While swerving his way through the flurries on a dark mountain road, he can’t stop himself from striking a woman who wanders in front of his car and he’s startled to find her alive—if, perhaps, a bit peculiar in her gait. 

Needless to say, this stranger is extremely not okay and turns out to be the first of many people (and animals) afflicted by a viral outbreak that originated in Raccoon City and spread to the outlying area. Cregger doesn’t get caught up in exposition, though, allowing all of the information about this monster pandemic to come out as Bryan discovers it, which is one of the few narrative strategies that’s effective in movies and games alike. With their odd tentacles and ability to create new, mutated combinations of living forms, the creatures in Resident Evil recall the kudzu-like effects of John Carpenter’s The Thing, but Cregger doesn’t settle for a grinding assortment of bloody showdowns. He also confronts Bryan with random bits of problem-solving, too, like a hilarious running joke where keeps getting foiled by padlocks. 

As with Cregger’s previous films, Barbarian and Weapons, the comedy never draws tension away from the horror and more often enhances it, like when Cregger punctuates a jump scare with zany misdirection or when Bryan dashes through a kamikaze gauntlet of monsters dropping from urban buildings above. A subplot involving Bryan trying to reconcile over the phone with his newly pregnant girlfriend attempts an emotional through-line that never quite connects and Resident Evil is the second film this month, after Na Hong-jin’s Hope, that’s put the promise of a sequel ahead of a proper ending. Not that a sequel would be unwelcome, mind. — Scott Tobias

Resident Evil opens everywhere tonight. Worth seeing on large-format screens for maximum scares (and guffaws).

The History of Concrete
Dir. John Wilson
100 min.

Experiencing a John Wilson project, whether it’s his beloved HBO series How To with John Wilson or his debut feature The History of Concrete, is like following a conversational tangent that leads so far off the main topic that you end up wondering how in the world you got there. That’s the sort of extraneous material that a ruthlessly efficient filmmaker would be inclined (or asked) to cut, but it’s Wilson’s off-kilter aesthetic mode, a storytelling technique that’s complemented by the B-roll footage he keeps folding into the tapestry. You might wonder how, for example, a documentary about concrete lands you in an unadorned Hallmark production studio just across the border in Canada. Or why you’re looking at a janky AI app connected to a wax museum in Rome. Or how the middle-aged singer in a half-originals/half-covers rock band who’s married to an esteemed Asian-American judge figures into all this. 

Though Wilson emerges from a nonfiction scene that’s been toggling playfully with the form, his voice is distinct in the literal sense, with a trembling cadence that suggests DIY amateurism, and in the specific ways it channels his particular interests. That one of those interests is deadpan, absurdist comedy doesn’t take away from a sneaky sincerity that undergirds his projects, like how multiple failed attempts to make “the perfect risotto” are incorporated into a How To episode on sustaining our humanity through a frightening pandemic. So while it’s a huge and funny joke that Wilson chronicles his own efforts to make a full-length documentary on concrete, the least sexy commercial prospect imaginable, he is also sincerely interested in the subject and slyly endeavors to make audiences interested in it, too. There’s more to concrete, and The History of Concrete, than you might have imagined. 

Picking up in the wake of his HBO show winding down after three seasons, The History of Concrete returns Wilson to the seemingly mundane obsession of infrastructure, which informed a How To episode on scaffolding that drew Mayor Mamdani’s attention. He treats concrete a little bit like the sun, in that it affects everyone’s lives profoundly but it’s not advisable to stare directly at it for too long. Thus Wilson uses a writer’s union seminar on Hallmark movies to create a can’t-miss formula for this documentary to get financed and distributed, hence the trip to Canada. He also lands on a rich metaphor for change, because concrete is a foundation that decays and crumbles and requires tending and renewal, which prompts acts of human creativity along with instances of institutional neglect and environmental horror. Wilson’s curiosity leads him down paths that are idiosyncratic and seemingly chaotic, but inevitably land on fascinating subcultures and profound insights. (An aside on media consolidation leads to this gem, for example: “When you treat cultural artifacts like poker chips, it’s hard to know what will happen when the casino shuts down.”) 

The History of Concrete peels off to odd-but-related destinations, like the Ohio home of the oldest concrete street in America (it’s not a smooth ride) and the Starbucks constructed out of 3D-printed concrete (which doubles as a comment on drone photography in documentaries). Then there are many odd-but-tangentially-related destinations, too, like the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3,100-Mile Race, which involves 52 days’ worth of laps around the same block in Queens, and a business that preserves the tattooed skin of the dead. In the broadest strokes, the film is a tribute to—and cautionary tale about—human nature, and the messy cycles of decay and rebirth that define it. Yet the experience of watching it feels personal, in that you gravitate toward the small things that catch your eye. John Wilson has a talent for turning you into John Wilson. — Scott Tobias

The History of Concrete opens in NYC tomorrow and expands from there. Details here.

The Weight
Dir. Padraic McKinley
113 min.

Though not officially a remake of H.G. Clouzot’s classic 1953 thriller The Wages of Fear like the 1977 William Friedkin cult favorite Sorcerer, the basic template for the new period piece The Weight mirrors it so closely that it may as well be called The Wages of Fear 3: The Legend of Clancy’s Gold. We once again have men desperate enough to risk their lives on a cross-country mission of extreme volatility, only here the cargo are backpacks full of gold bars rather than truckloads of nitroglycerin. For director Padraic McKinley, the risk/reward factor is also unusually high: He can exploit the shake-and-bake tension of Clouzot’s premise and what it brings out of working-class roughnecks who are making the ultimate gamble, but he also has to emerge from an awfully long shadow. Perhaps predictably, he has delivered a rock-solid, impeccably acted thriller that also struggles to find an identity. What, exactly, is being said here? 

One thing that can be said is that Ethan Hawke continues to get more compelling with age, though that’s been the case since he eked past 30 at the turn of the millennium. With the quiet confidence of an actor who’s been a leading man his entire career, Hawke evokes an old-school Western hero as Samuel Murphy, a widower in 1930s Oregon who’s both cool under pressure and fiercely determined to reverse a miscarriage of justice against him. When he and his young daughter (Avy Berry) are out looking for temporary housing after an eviction, Murphy gets in a wrong-place/wrong-time situation where he’s given hard time at a labor camp for a crime he didn’t commit. As his daughter is put through a foster-care system that threatens to deny him future custody, Murphy gets an offer from his dodgy warden Clancy (Russell Crowe) to join forces with three fellow inmates and move gold across 50 miles of untamed wilderness. If he succeeds, Clancy will grant him early release. 

The offer is dubious on its face. Murphy can’t possibly take Clancy at his word, and his fellow convicts, no matter how carefully selected, may be motivated to betray the crew, and take their gold bars and run. (Murphy is told that not a single bar can go missing, which amps up the tension in more ways than one.) Adding more complication is an indigenous woman (Julia Jones) who’s more resourceful and dangerous than she appears, and other strangers and physical obstacles that threaten their passage. The visceral action sequences in The Weight tend to be the most satisfying, particularly a Sorcerer-esque scene on a rickety rope bridge that involves moving the gold one carefully lobbed bar at a time. The heaviness of the gold accounts for the literal meaning of the title, but The Weight carries a much lighter thematic rucksack, other than faintly echoing the anti-capitalist sentiments that are so essential to a source like The Wages of Fear. It’s a rousing hero’s journey, though, amounting to no more or no less than Hawke’s mesmerizing Murphy putting himself through the wringer to find his way home. That’s as fine a rationale to make a movie as any. — Scott Tobias

The Weight opens in theaters everywhere tomorrow.