Dying is easy; comedy, hard.
Of course I was going to check this out-- Zach Cregger's Weapons was one of the more interesting horrors of last year, Barbarians one of the more interesting horrors before that.
Does it deliver? Save you the suspense: yes, but how it delivers is I submit the question to ask.
Word is Cregger's a fan of the video games and wrote a spec script on his own, ready to convert to a standalone if his bid failed. But I remember Austin Abrams' dopehead in Weapons being the more easily relatable woozily resourceful consistently funny character in that picture, and I could totally see Cregger envisioning a spinoff based on his character, sending him running across the shattered landscapes of the Evil games.
Abrams is the MVP here-- the movie stays with him for nearly its entire length, and you really don't mind the quality time. He's Bryan, a gig delivery worker tired and trying to shake off some very real problems (the news his girl is pregnant for one) to focus on the job. So when he has just finished delivering after a long shift and a doctor offers him a last-minute run at double the pay, easily the most relatable moment in the whole movie (perhaps in all the movies I've seen recently) is when he swallows hard and says "I can do that."
"You have snow tires or chains?"
"Yeah yeah I got em."
"Are you sure? If you don't have snow tires or chains I have to find someone else."
"Hey-- no sweat."
I like him already.
Love Bryan's sadsack shambling, the way he fumbles and drops things, the way he keeps running up against padlocks-- easily the picture's funniest running (standing?) gag, not to mention Bryan's inexpert way of dealing with them. Cars swerving, cars crashing, car keys gone missing, solidly planted metal gates, infuriatingly high chainlink fences, electric fences (they're no joke, the current hurts like a sonfabitch), prominently displayed shotguns whose shells are always kept in the last drawer you look-- it's like this so-called 'postapocalypse' world is actually the real world only a notch more annoying.
Cregger employs Polish cinematographer Dariusz Wolski to light-- barely-- his landscapes; Wolski is a good pick, having lit (barely) Alex Proyas' moodily stylish The Crow (supposedly Detroit, but I've been to Detroit and it doesn't look as dank as the Wilmington NC locations the film was actually shot in) and Ridley Scott's dark comedy The Counselor, so if anyone can achieve the environments Cregger wants-- basements with fungus stained walls and a single flickering bulb, dim corridors ending in giant metal doors rusted shut, the occasional bright biolab with antiseptically gleaming lab equipment-- it's Wolski.
There are moments where Cregger shifts to first-person shooter mode, the gun barrel doubling as camera lens trained down one unlit hallway after another, angling downward to peer into yanked drawers looking for ammo or food or something to use. At one point Bryan pokes his head into the fridge (Why not check the freezer? I know folks that store ammo in their freezer), actually takes a moment to chug down a gallon of milk (gotta stay hydrated, and the protein helps)-- classic gamer move to replenish his stamina bar. Early on Bryan stands against a farm fence looking around, and what he sees has an eerie beauty-- the snowblanketed landscape, the brutal glare of arc lamps, the muffled silence; later he's scrambling away from the farmhouse front door when the creature, having assembled itself from a pair of corpses, finally introduces itself-- and introduces itself, and introduces itself-- a hilarious yet somehow evocative image, like something Hieronymus Bosch and Tom Six might collaborate on after chugging down a gallon of bad milk. Possible Cregger actually does confine himself to the kind of shots you'll see in the video game, but this doesn't look like a game, more like a well-photographed horror with flashes of brilliance-- possibly you have to be a player to recognize said shots.
There are moments-- Bryan's encounter with the little girl in the RV for one-- where his decency shines through (he keeps giving the girl reassurances he can't possibly deliver on) and it's crucial because that point onward he has you on his side, you know he really wants to do the right thing, even deliver that ridiculous cooler-bag mcguffin instead of tossing it aside and driving home to spend his last days with his girlfriend. He wants it all-- including yes the extra hours of double pay-- against increasingly impossible odds.
What Cregger's doing isn't anything new, is if anything as old as the silents. Referring of course to the thriller comedies of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, and Cregger fares best working in the margins of or adjacent to that hallowed comic tradition, ringing fresh changes on or totally new situations from this postapocalypse (I think I can say that even if the situation is only a few hours old). I'm thinking of Bryan at the barn ("ladder!") and Bryan in the truck facing the farm gate (actually the latter might have been inspired by Wile E. Coyote more than anything). When Cregger sets himself up for more direct comparison-- stealing, say, the climactic climb up the side of a building in Lloyd's classic Safety Last-- the momentum doesn't build, the previous gag doesn't set up for the next one, the viewer (as James Agee would put it) isn't really a victim being led "up this ladder of laughs by cruelly controlled degrees to the top rung, (which the comic) would then proceed to wobble, shake, wave and brandish... until he groaned for mercy." Cregger does his best, I'll give him that, but he's no Lloyd, much less a Keaton.
The climax inside Umbrella Corporation's top floor biolab is something of a letdown-- Abrams isn't really driving the mayhem and the poor scientists aren't skilled or distinct enough comedians to make us want to root for them, much less laugh at them. They emanate the distinct odor of flop sweat, poor performers strutting and fretting their final minutes on-camera long after the star has checked out-- tho the closing minutes do give us a heroically posed Bryan, ready for his upcoming sequel.
Pretty good for the most part, sadly doesn't stick the landing, doesn't resonate as much as Cregger' previous horror, still my favorite of his works (mainly for Cary Christopher's surprisingly poignant performance); not even sure I can call this the best of the franchise as I still hold affection for Paul WS Anderson's less arty versions (my favorite being Resident Evil: Retribution, complete with gorgeous fight choreography straight out of a '90s Hong Kong action flick). Afraid my verdict on the picture's finale is harsh but what can I say? I've been spoiled by the very best.
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