‘RESIDENT EVIL’ is Obviously the Best Video Game Movie Of All Time…But What Does That Even Mean?

Horror wunderkind Zach Cregger has already proven himself twice over, so when he announced that his Weapons follow-up would be an original Resident Evil adaptation, this critic had reservations but understood the draw. Commercial IP. A bigger paycheck. Material he’s clearly passionate about. It all makes sense as a third feature. What seemed less likely was that any video game adaptation could match the shock and awe of Barbarian or the puzzle-box complexity and thematic heft of Weapons. But that simply isn’t the self-assignment here. Resident Evil is less the next step in Cregger’s evolution as a writer-director than a balls-to-the-wall detour into commercially viable camp. And he pulls it off handily.

Cregger throws us into the infected chaos of Raccoon City immediately. Hapless organ delivery driver Bryan (Austin Abrams) – who has just learned his girlfriend is pregnant and responded with less than empathetic enthusiasm – is finishing his shift when he’s asked if he wants to transport some high-priority organic material at double pay. Not one to pass up extra scratch – especially now with his girlfriend infected with baby – the glorified Postmates driver takes the gig. His transport is interrupted by a very infected-looking woman who leaps at his car in the middle of an icy road and is promptly plowed down. We know she’s infected. Bryan does not. Which makes logical sense if you don’t know you’re living inside a horror movie and all. He tries to buckle her up and get her medical attention while she swipes at his face and otherwise gestures at trying to murder him. The movie easily shifts between being repulsive, comedic, unnerving, and fun before its protagonist even has the chance to understand who he’s driving and what he’s driving into.

The story, working from a script from Cregger and Shay Hatten, doesn’t feel obligated to tuck into the broader IP mythology or retrace any particular game’s plot. Pretty much all of it is invented whole cloth for this story and yet it’s unmistakably Resident Evil. Cregger gets there less through lore dumps than the iconography and rhythm of survival horror writ large: cartoony shotgun-shell boxes, medical bags emblazoned with giant plus signs, abandoned corridors lit by flickering lights, rooms full of filing cabinets and typewriters surely filled with backstory for those looking to read more text during their gameplay. These are definitively video game spaces, designed to be searched before something inevitably jumps out at you with a loud BANG! The movie meanwhile moves from snowy backroads to empty streets, underground sewers, and an overrun hospital, each new environment opening up like another level to be explored. Anyone who has spent time with a survival horror game of any sort will instantly recognize the look and feel of it all, though Resident Evil resists becoming a feature-length checklist of mutilated monsters and the creepy spaces they reside in.

Abrams makes for an excellent, unexpected protagonist as Bryan, a bumbling everyday dude with absolutely no business being an action hero surviving an outbreak. He may level up from pistol to shotgun to assault rifle but never once feels even slightly competent with any of them. There’s no a-ha moment where this unlucky dude trapped in a waking nightmare suddenly becomes a competent badass dispatching baddies. His incompetence is funny but it’s also a major engine for Resident Evil‘s tension: whether he can get a magazine loaded before something reaches him is always a live concern. He’s a gamer himself, and the third-person POV reinforces the idea that someone who usually experiences this chaos through a controller and a screen would not fare well in an actual survival situation, swearing in disbelief at how thoroughly fucked he is.

Cregger’s impeccable sense of timing does the rest of the heavy lifting. There’s very little wasted motion, and he knows when a laugh will keep the pursuit from going monotonous – and deploys comedy readily. He also knows that a jump scare is best served when it pays off in not quite the way you expect. The movie establishes early that this is basically a full-blown horror comedy and none of it is to be taken seriously. It can catch you off guard with its jump scares but it isn’t outright scary – though it is unsettling and downright mean in instances – and it gets unabashedly campier as it goes. Paul Walter Hauser arrives midway through as a functional exposition machine, delivering the backstory on Umbrella Corp and the accident mid-experiment that turned the denizens of Raccoon City into stark-raving man-eating meat-machines. The explanations are clunky and ridiculous but the movie isn’t embarrassed enough by that fact to try to minimize its absurdity.

Cregger isn’t here to pass judgment on his source material. He’s here to make a version of it that works. The staging is invariably strong – the set pieces split between breakneck pace and patience – and he orchestrates an audience’s reactions without ever letting the pace suffer. There’s real pleasure in watching a director who knows exactly when to make us hold our breath, then hold it even longer while something sprints toward his panicked lead just out of frame. Even when the story takes a familiar tack, the filmmaking is never short of inspired.

That commitment to pure genre pleasure is also where Resident Evil runs into its ceiling. Cregger has translated the games’ iconography, pacing, and escalating panic with unmatched fluency, but there’s less going on beneath the surface than there was in, say, Weapons. There’s no Amy Madigan-sized performance blowing a hole through the movie. No structural trick that forces you to reconsider what you’ve been watching. No deeper idea waiting to snap into focus. The surprises are more likely to come in the form of a many-footed, many-handed terror spiraling around a corner than from the narrative of the story itself.

None of that stops Resident Evil from being the best video game movie adaptation ever. Admittedly, the competition is nothing close to formidable: Mortal Kombat, Sonic the Hedgehog, Minecraft, Super Mario Bros., Uncharted, Prince of Persia, Tomb Raider, the previous six Resident Evil movies. For whatever reason, these things almost never work. Cregger’s does. But topping that sad little heap of woebegone adaptations is the least interesting thing about it. For 97 minutes this is a zipping, gory, tense, funny thrill ride that never stops to catch its breath, and the only real knock is that Cregger has set such an impossibly bar high that a “great time at the movies” now feels like a step down.

CONCLUSION: Zach Cregger hasn’t necessarily one-upped himself with ‘Resident Evil’ so much as shifted his focus to create a well-crafted, goopy horror-comedy that perfectly captures the inimitable feeling of playing a survival-horror game. But there’s enough blood-vessel-bursting energy, creatively explosive set pieces, and pure narrative propulsion here for it to easily claim the hyperbolic title of best video game movie ever.