The American Astronaut (2001)

Zach Cregger is a few things.  For one, he is the director of Resident Evil.  He’s also the acclaimed director of Weapons and Barbarian.  He was also born in 1981.  All of these facts are relevant.

Full disclosure, I am one of the very few people on this planet that did not like Weapons.  (Although even I have to admit the climax was pretty cool).  Thus, just like with Weapons, I found Cregger’s approach to dark comedy in Resident Evil to be off-putting and ugly.  If that sounds discrediting to you, then Resident Evil might just be for you. 

But it is also conceivable that someone who liked the comedy in Weapons might find the comedy in this movie to be less than stellar.  A lot of it is the main character Bryan, played by Austin Abrams, reacting to horrifying things with various curse words.  It gets to the point where you wonder if this film measures up to Scarface or Pulp Fiction in its use of profanity – though certainly not in its writing.  Much of the other jokes amount to our main character being inept in this situation, which is relatable but slows the film down considerably. Other jokes come from characters dying when they aren't expected to die, which does subvert expectations in a positive way, but leaves the script with very few personalities to anchor the film around.  This means that Bryan needs to be a magnetic character on the level of Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken from Escape from New York. Instead, Bryan is a bit of a wet blanket, and ninety percent of his personality is mere bewilderment.  He gets one major emotional scene, but there is never any payoff for that scene, and it feels completely shoehorned into the film, clashing tonally with the rest of the picture.