Resident Evil - Movie Review

Resident Evil movies have spent years treating Resident Evil like an embarrassing suggestion. The games had zombies, monsters, locked doors, strange keys, resource management, and an atmosphere built around the slow realization that everything has gone catastrophically wrong. The films mostly had other ideas.

Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil is different. It feels like someone involved has actually played the games. That should not be a revolutionary achievement, but here we are.

Welcome to Raccoon City

This is not an adaptation of any particular game. Instead, we follow a medical courier trying to deliver a package to a hospital in Raccoon City. Naturally, the city has been ravaged by the T-virus, because apparently medical couriers are the only people still willing to work there.

Austin Abrams plays the protagonist as a complete fish out of water. He is not a seasoned soldier or a grizzled survivor. He is a guy who has wandered into a nightmare and spends much of the movie trying to understand what kind of nightmare it is.

That works. Resident Evil is at its best when ordinary people are forced to navigate an impossible situation with limited information and even fewer bullets. Abrams brings the right amount of confusion and panic to the role, along with a surprisingly strong comedic rhythm.

The movie is funnier than I expected. Not in a way that turns the whole thing into a parody, either. Much of the humor comes from the situation itself: a normal guy encountering video-game logic in the middle of a biological disaster.

He needs keys to open doors. Of course he does. The locks are not simply reinforced steel. They are protected by the ancient power of game mechanics.

The game is in the details

The strongest part of this Resident Evil is the texture. You get the typewriter. You get the green shotgun-shell ammunition box. You get a shotgun mounted on a wall, waiting for somebody to have the good sense to take it.

These references generally feel like part of the world instead of desperate reminders that the audience paid to see Resident Evil. There is a difference between a genuine nod and a studio waving a recognizable object in your face while whispering, “Remember this?”

The structure also borrows from the games in a way that matters. The protagonist begins with a relatively contained problem, encounters an infected person, explores a house, and then gets pulled into a larger crisis. The monsters escalate. The danger spreads. The situation keeps getting worse.

That progression gives the movie a proper survival-horror shape. It feels less like a superhero origin story with zombies and more like a playable nightmare that somebody has unfortunately removed the controller from.

The house sequence is especially effective, although I kept thinking that a game version would have made him stay there for another forty-five minutes, search every drawer, and find three documents explaining the backstory of a dead man nobody will ever meet.

Horror with a punchline

Resident Evil is also a dark horror comedy, which caught me off guard. The humor works for most of the movie because it does not completely deflate the tension. The danger still feels present. A joke may land, but the characters remain in serious trouble.

Paul Walter Hauser fits comfortably into that tone. His presence suggests comedy, and yes, there is comedy, but the film does not dump all its jokes into one character and then leave the rest of the cast standing around waiting for their turn.

I did think the movie could have eased off near the end. The first two acts find a decent balance between dread and absurdity. By the final act, the jokes occasionally hang around after the tension has already made its point. The humor still works, but the movie would have benefited from letting a few moments breathe.

That matters because Resident Evil’s best scares come from anticipation. The door. The hallway. The sound you cannot place. The possibility that the thing you saw move in the corner is about to become a much larger problem.

Comedy can sharpen that tension. It can also poke a hole in it. Cregger mostly knows the difference, though the final stretch gets a little careless.

The adaptation problem

Here is where the fan complaints make sense.

A new story can work. The Resident Evil games have already explored mansions, police stations, laboratories, villages, abandoned facilities, and practically every other place where a sensible person would refuse to spend the night. There is room for a fresh protagonist and a new route through the mythology.

The problem is that the movie sometimes feels like it wants credit for the Resident Evil name while avoiding the responsibility that comes with it. The references are there, but the larger story does not connect as strongly to the characters, history, or timeline fans know.

There were moments when I thought the movie might tie directly into the games’ universe. It gestures toward that possibility, then backs away. By the end, the separation feels less like a creative choice and more like a line the studio drew around the property.

That feeds the suspicion that the Resident Evil branding was attached after the basic movie existed, whether or not that is literally how the production came together. Fans can tell when an adaptation is using the source material as fuel and when it is using the source material as a security blanket.

The altered characters and compressed mythology will frustrate people who wanted the games brought to the screen with more care. Previous attempts at fidelity have not exactly covered themselves in glory, but that does not mean the answer is to remove most of the connective tissue and hope a typewriter does the heavy lifting.

The abrupt finish

The ending is the weakest part of the film.

The story builds steadily. The scale expands. The threat becomes more intense. Then the movie reaches a point where it feels like it should deliver a full final movement, and instead it appears to check the runtime and leave the building.

It is not disastrous. It is simply undercooked. The resolution does not match the momentum that came before it, and some of the material shown in the trailer is missing from the final film, which only makes the cut-off feel stranger.

I wanted one more sequence. One more escalation. Some indication that the movie knew where all this was going before it decided to stop.

Final take

Resident Evil is the best Resident Evil movie. That is both praise and an indictment of the franchise’s cinematic history.

Cregger understands the vibe: the isolation, the resource pressure, the strange locks, the escalating monsters, and the feeling that every solution creates a worse problem. Austin Abrams carries the film well, and the horror-comedy blend works far better than it has any right to.

The loose adaptation remains a problem, especially for fans who want the games treated as more than a collection of props and brand recognition. The ending also leaves the movie feeling unfinished.

Still, I had a good time. The nods mostly feel earned, the tension holds, and this finally resembles a Resident Evil movie instead of a completely unrelated action film wearing a familiar name tag.

Verdict: Recommended, with reservations.

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