Zach Cregger's Resident Evil Review: The Best Adaptation of What It Feels Like to Play the Games

Zach Cregger's new Resident Evil does not try to retell any of Capcom's games or drag Leon, Claire, and the rest of the familiar cast back onto the screen yet again. Instead of adapting the story of Resident Evil, the director decided to adapt the experience of playing it: getting nervous, missing shots, wasting ammo, making terrible decisions, and somehow still surviving long enough to reach the next room.And, surprisingly, this approach turns out to be one of the most successful ways Resident Evil has ever been brought to the big screen.

No Familiar Heroes

The movie's protagonist is Bryan, a medical courier played by Austin Abrams. He ends up in Raccoon City during a T-virus outbreak and quickly realizes that he is completely unprepared for zombies, mutants, or pretty much anything else happening around him.That distinction is crucial. Bryan is not a supersoldier, a perfectly trained agent, or an action hero. He makes mistakes, panics, swears, shoots badly, and regularly does exactly the kind of thing that makes a player ask themselves five minutes later, "Why the hell did I even go in there?"That makes him remarkably easy to relate to. In a sense, Bryan really is the player character, just without the usual layer of heroism. He does not suddenly turn into a killing machine ten minutes into the movie. He keeps surviving mostly through stubbornness, luck, and his willingness to keep moving after yet another disaster.Austin Abrams basically carries the entire movie on his shoulders. For much of its runtime, Resident Evil plays like a one-man show, and Bryan's anxious, slightly ridiculous personality fits perfectly with the madness unfolding around him.

Resident Evil Without Fan Service, Yet Made for Fans

Cregger clearly loves the games, but he never spends the entire movie nudging the audience and shouting, "Look, it's that thing you remember!" There are still plenty of references. Familiar doors, scavenging for supplies, healing items, locks, laboratories, sewers, the dark streets of Raccoon City, and plenty of other elements will immediately register with fans of the series.Even the structure feels like a game. Bryan gets an objective, moves forward, encounters enemies, reaches a new location, survives a major set piece, and then heads toward the next destination.At the same time, the movie never turns into a mindless parade of Easter eggs. Instead of directly adapting Resident Evil 2 or Resident Evil 4, Cregger takes the broader language of the series and uses it to tell his own story. That's exactly why the absence of Leon, Claire, and other familiar characters works in the movie's favor. Newcomers do not need to memorize decades of names and events, while fans still get an atmosphere they immediately recognize.Even the familiar Resident Evil routine of dealing with locked doors, keys, and limited resources becomes part of the comedy. Anyone who has ever spent half an hour running around a mansion or police station looking for the right key will understand the joke without any explanation.

A Horror Movie That Keeps Turning Into Comedy

As pure horror, the new Resident Evil falls noticeably short of the genre's scariest films. It is much more interested in provoking nervous laughter and disgust than genuinely terrifying the audience. That is both one of its greatest strengths and one of its biggest weaknesses.Cregger constantly jumps between tension, body horror, and outright farce. One minute Bryan is creeping down a dark corridor, and the next the situation has turned into something close to physical comedy. Then another bloody sequence begins, only for the movie to release the tension with another joke.At its best, this rhythm works brilliantly, especially when the joke does not destroy the horror but instead makes the next disturbing moment even harder to anticipate.But if you expect Resident Evil to be a bleak and genuinely frightening horror movie, you may come away disappointed. Cregger is almost always ready to turn even the most disgusting creature into part of some elaborate visual gag.Then again, Resident Evil has never been an entirely serious franchise. Beyond its tense corridors and limited resources, the games have always had ridiculous villains, gigantic mutants, absurd dialogue, and completely unhinged plot twists. In that respect, the movie captures the spirit of the source material surprisingly well.

The Monsters and Effects Are a Highlight

You can argue about how frightening Resident Evil actually is, but visually, the movie is an absolute blast.Cregger makes extensive use of practical effects, blood, prosthetics, and grotesque physical transformations. The monsters look filthy, wet, and deeply unpleasant, exactly the way creatures in the Resident Evil universe should.And the movie does not stop at regular zombies. Stranger creatures gradually begin to appear, and some sequences move into almost Lovecraftian body-horror territory.What works especially well is that most of the creatures do not feel like direct copies of enemies from the games. They can be completely new and still look as though they belong naturally inside the Resident Evil universe.There are also several genuinely memorable set pieces: a car sequence, a particularly nasty encounter involving an elevator, scenes in the sewers, and a large-scale zombie sequence that could easily have been an entire level in one of the games. The movie rarely seems interested in slowing down.

A Lean Runtime

At roughly 90 minutes, Resident Evil benefits enormously from keeping things short. The story is extremely simple and mostly revolves around getting Bryan from point A to point B. There is no complicated Umbrella political conspiracy, no huge ensemble cast, and no attempt to explain the entire history of the franchise in a single movie.After a fairly lengthy opening, the story simply starts moving and barely slows down again.Sometimes that simplicity becomes a problem. The plot really is paper-thin, some characters appear for only a few minutes, and the ending will probably feel too abrupt for some viewers. Certain ideas are introduced and then immediately left behind because Bryan already needs to run toward the next location.But that same approach is also why Resident Evil almost never drags.Instead of two and a half hours of explanations, we get a compact adventure that understands exactly why the audience bought a ticket in the first place.

The Movie's Biggest Problem

As much as Cregger's approach works, it has one obvious limitation: the director seems almost incapable of staying serious for very long.Even when a scene starts working as genuine horror, a joke, one of Bryan's awkward reactions, or an especially disgusting visual gag almost inevitably arrives. As a result, it is difficult to call Resident Evil genuinely scary.At times, the movie starts to resemble Evil Dead, with its protagonist simultaneously suffering, panicking, and becoming part of an increasingly ridiculous nightmare. That works extremely well for a horror-comedy, but fans of the darker Resident Evil games may be disappointed.The same applies to the story itself. There is almost none of the seriousness that the more recent games occasionally try to maintain. The movie embraces its own absurdity almost immediately and then keeps escalating it.

And Yet, It Feels Surprisingly Right for Resident Evil

The most interesting thing about Cregger's movie is how little direct fan service it needs to feel like Resident Evil. He is not simply adapting one particular game or retelling the story of an established character. He understands the rhythm of playing Resident Evil.A dark room. A strange noise. A locked door. Not enough ammunition. Another monster. A panicked attempt to aim. The right solution. One more door. Here we go again. Then, finally, a few seconds of relief before the entire cycle starts over.And the movie is not depicting a perfect playthrough. It looks much closer to the way many of us actually play these games for the first time.That is the whole joke behind Bryan. This is not Leon Kennedy calmly flipping his way between chainsaws. This is a guy who has absolutely no idea what is waiting behind the next door and is sincerely hoping that, for once, nothing on the other side will try to eat him for at least a few minutes.And that is exactly why you want to keep following him.

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The new Resident Evil will almost certainly divide longtime fans. It has none of the familiar protagonists, the story is deliberately simple, and there is considerably more comedy than genuine terror. But if you accept Cregger's rules, what you get is an extremely entertaining, bloody, and unexpectedly accurate adaptation of the Resident Evil experience.It is not an adaptation of a game's story. It is an adaptation of what it feels like to play one.