Resident Evil Review: A delightfully grotesque thrill ride
“Indecision is the thief of opportunity, but it is also the architect of disaster.” – Adapted from Cicero
The very topic of video game-adapted movies is a contentious one. And by contentious, I mean that studios generally have no earthly idea what they’re doing. There is a persistent blind spot for Hollywood executives when it comes to video games; they simply cannot seem to get out of their own way. For an industry notorious for meddling and micromanaging, this interference becomes especially egregious when attempting to translate a gaming IP to the silver screen. It really is a perplexing phenomenon. The earliest live-action video game-adapted movie, 1993’s Super Mario Bros., famously initiated the "video game movie curse" that has haunted the industry for decades.
Identifying even more connective tissue, the very franchise I am here to talk about, Resident Evil, previously endured its own Paul W.S. Anderson six-film run starring Milla Jovovich. While the original 2002 entry has minor structural merits—mostly stemming from modern nostalgia goggles—overall, it remains a terrible franchise of films directed by one of cinema's worst modern blockbuster directors, ranking just a sliver above someone like Uwe Boll. In fact, Anderson might be the worst thing to ever happen to video games shy of Boll himself, who routinely ruined beloved franchises like Far Cry, House of the Dead, and BloodRayne, leaving a trail of cinematic victims in his wake.
Boll’s "efforts" are notorious and exist in a low-tier subgenre all their own. But his films, much like Anderson’s and countless other generic attempts at adapting this interactive medium, commit innumerable cinematic sins. The most recurring insult is the total stripping of any spiritual connectivity to the source material. These filmmakers get entirely lost in surface-level visual comparisons, desperate to create environments resembling the game screens but completely forgetting to inject anything of actual depth—like a soul.
The best, most lasting, and impactful video games connect deeply with their players. The narratives and the mechanics endear themselves by providing tangible substance: memorable characters, an oppressive setting, and a formidable villain whose purpose resides within logic. Much is the same with villains in traditional cinema—the strongest antagonists are relatable and their core motivations make sense, even if their ultimate execution is monstrous. If their reasoning is sound, the audience can understand their trajectory, and that means everything to the narrative.
Crucially, a director must never sever that spiritual connectivity. If you can preserve that core essence while interpreting the story through your own creative lens—a lens that must strictly lie within a realm of love and respect for the games—you get something like Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil. This is why, unequivocally, without any kind of caveat or meeting-the-material-halfway mentality, this is the first live-action video game-adapted movie that is unfailingly spectacular.
Cregger's truest debut was 2022’s Barbarian, which through word-of-mouth alone became a massive psychological horror sensation. Because of that success, we received his most audacious effort yet, 2025’s Weapons. It was during the press junket for that film that he officially announced his intentions to reboot Resident Evil, and here we are on the precipice of its worldwide release. Not only is it the first truly great, feature-length, live-action video game-adapted movie, it marks the first time I have entered a theater with genuine faith in the material. I had no reason to doubt Cregger, and by the end credits, he confirmed that my early enthusiasm was well earned.
Even among the chaos, Cregger's directorial maturity is clearer than ever; his propensity for knowing exactly when to pull back and when to go for the jugular is his greatest skillset. This is the kind of story that demands insanity, and Cregger certainly delivers a heaping, unholy amount of absurd carnage and incessant scares. Yet, he still allows his actors to maintain their characters' humanity among so much brilliant, cinematic lunacy. That equilibrium requires immense structural calm, if only for a brief, fleeting moment squeezed in between a human fleshball amalgamation of limbs and random faces, and infected rodents bursting from the stomach of an abnormally large man resembling Baron Harkonnen.
Austin Abrams—previously seen in Cregger’s Weapons as a misguided drug addict—is slightly more put together here, but still mostly hopeless. I am sensing a thematic trend. In Weapons, his handicap was heroin; in Resident Evil, it is a more abstract idea of paralyzing indecision that ultimately sends him down a path from which he cannot return. His fear of facing his newly pregnant girlfriend has sent him mentally spiraling. As a result, he takes one last medical delivery job for the night, desperately trading for a bit more time before he has to confront her and face a sudden, life-altering reality that will not go away. It is his cowardice that sends him on a delivery route to Raccoon City General Hospital, trapping him in a night of unimaginable, unfathomable horrors filled with physical and metaphorical aberrations of nature that violate all basic understanding of reality.
Where the film brilliantly captures the energy and spirit of the games is in the progression of this character’s journey from an average bad night into a claustrophobic nightmare of impossibilities. Things progressively and aggressively deteriorate from moment to moment, constantly alluding to the likelihood that everything is not going to be okay. There is never a false moment of hope signaling a happy Hollywood escape. His night gets worse, and his choice of weaponry grows along with it, perfectly mirroring game mechanics. He levels up from a standard pistol to an empty double-barrel shotgun. He has to frantically locate ammunition in the nick of time as villainous, hellacious creatures close in with great haste. Finally, he secures an automatic machine gun as the ultimate escalation.
The most obvious theme throughout this entire journey is that this guy has absolutely no idea what he is doing. He is so hopelessly out of his depth that it’s a minor miracle he survives past the first act. Abrams’ character, Bryan, is a perfect representation of what actual fans of this franchise would look and behave like if they were suddenly dropped into a survival-horror environment. A lot of gamers try to convince themselves that they would behave like John Wick in a horde of infected, but in reality, we would all be Bryan. The movie acts as a mirror, and Bryan is the unfiltered reflection staring back at us. Like it or not.
This sensibility carries beautifully into the humor of the movie, which is abundant but thankfully always rooted in genuineness, ensuring it never feels forced. Early reports indicated that some test screening complaints cited too much humor, prompting Cregger to scale back the jokes while carefully maintaining the funnier side of something so delightfully grotesque. A major part of that balance relies on Abrams’ natural ability to react to what he’s experiencing in a way that feels honest, horrified, understandably confused, and effortlessly comical—sometimes all at once. This brand of disquieting humor, a signature of their previous collaboration, carries over perfectly into Resident Evil as one of the strongest tools in Cregger and Abrams’ collective arsenal.
Resident Evil makes Zach Cregger three-for-three, cementing his presence as a permanent force in modern horror cinema. Many film historians might argue that the video game movie curse was already broken by the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, which has steadily coasted through multiple box-office hits with more blockbusters on the way. But there is a massive chasm between a mascot-driven family comedy and a live-action, narrative-driven adult horror feature. While Sonic proved that video game movies could be massive commercial successes, Cregger proves that they can be legitimate pieces of exceptional, uncompromising cinema. You might not be able to declare the curse completely shattered based on a single film, but for the first time in thirty years, we can finally welcome hope back into the equation.
Rated R For: strong bloody violence, gore and language throughout
Runtime: 90 minutes
After Credits Scene: No
Genre: Horror, Survival, Action
Starring: Austin Abrams, Kali Reis, Paul Walter Hauser, Zach Cherry
Directed By: Zach Cregger
Out of 10
Story: 8/ Acting: 9/ Directing: 10/ Visuals: 10
OVERALL: 9/10
Buy to Own: Yes.
Check out the trailer below:
