From the Perspective of a Player Character

It’s been a while since we’ve had a Resident EvilFirst released a Biohazard, the Resident Evil games, and eventually movies (awkwardly and clumsily) tell the stories of a world ravaged by zombies and the greedy corporate, Umbrella, seeking to profit from the mess. movie we could get excited for. Honestly, I haven’t been interested in any of the Resident Evil films since the very first one all the way back in 2002, and that wasn’t even a very good movie (even if I do still enjoy it). The follow-ups were increasingly shitty, and yet they were still miles better than any of the animated films that Capcom themselves put out. And the less said about the various attempts at television shows set in the universe (all of which were so bad I couldn’t even get far enough into them to warrant reviewing them), well… the better.

Which means that, in many ways, the newest Resident Evil movie by Zach Cregger might just be the first real movie in the franchise that really caters to fans. Which is ironic because the fans have actually noted how much they don’t like the fact that this film doesn’t feel like a Resident Evil movie. And I would agree with that assessment. If what you are looking for is a film that adapts the world of Resident Evil and tries to make a cohesive storyline that fits into the game series’ overall grand narrative, then Resident Evil ‘26 is not the movie for you. It is not that kind of Resident Evil movie.

Instead it’s a movie that is clearly trying to be Resident Evil. And by that I mean it has a regular, hapless schmuck who gets dropped into a Resident Evil adventure, with all the monsters, the guns, the random keys you have to find to unlock progress, and then we watch as he tries to navigate it. It’s both the least faithful to the story, and yet most faithful to the mechanics, Resident Evil we could have possibly gotten, but I think that also makes it the most watchable film in the franchise so far… not that we were discussing a very high bar to begin with.

The film opens with protagonist Bryan (Austin Abrams) as he’s making his way into a hospital to deliver an organ. He works as a medical courier, taking needed organs from one place to another, like a Door Dash driver for hearts and livers and stuff. He’s not particularly great at the job, but he’s willing to work in terrible conditions, like the snowstorm that’s moving in, so he keeps getting gigs. And in fact, after dropping off one organ at the hospital, he gets hired for a double-pay, priority drop-off all the way in Racoon City. Naturally, he takes the gig.

As he’s driving up the mountains to get over to the city, though, he struggles to keep his car under control in the icy and snowy conditions. That leaves him unable to watch the road as well as he should, so when a woman comes stumbling out of the woods, he hits her. But when he gets up to investigate, she’s already moved off. He finds her, puts her in his car, and starts to drive off, only for a cop to pull him over. He explains what’s going on, so the cop takes the woman and has Bryan follow him, only for the cop to then swerve and fly off the road, and the woman promptly escapes and comes for Bryan. Now Bryan not only has to worry about this crazed woman trying to kill him, and his own car which refuses to start back up, but he still has to find a way to make his delivery, all so he can get back home to his girlfriend. But things will only get more complicated from here.

Resident Evil ‘26 really does feel like Cregger, who wrote and directed the film, wanted to put a character through all the beats of a Resident Evil game. He gets stuck out in the middle of nowhere and has to find his way through the adventure. He finds various weird and scary monsters who constantly come after him. He finds guns that let him steadily upgrade his arsenal (from a pistol, to a shotgun, to a machine gun). He goes through various set pieces, one by one, as he progresses. And there are even keys he has to find to unlock new sections of the zones. If you wanted to take the beats of the games and put them into a movie, this would be that kind of film.

What works about this is, first and foremost, this is a faithful way to adapt the games. Because the movie follows these beats, it doesn’t come across as just a generic monster flick or zombie movie, which was something the previous Resident Evil productions have struggled with. The more you play down the gaming aspects of the series for film, the more everything feels far more generic and far less interesting. And instead of trying to paste characters and storylines from the games into the film, which would only draw further comparison to the source material, Cregger decided just to copy over the mechanics, and it somehow feels more like Resident Evil than anything that’s come before.

But the second trick Cregger pulls is that he lets Bryan comment on what’s going on around him like a normal person. Bryan isn’t trained. He’s not a soldier brought in by Umbrella, or a cop working in Racoon City. He’s just a dude that gets stuck in this world and suddenly has to navigate it. He gets scared, he freaks out, he wastes bullets, all as you or I would do. But he also talks to himself, bitching about needing to find keys, about how locks can’t be broken, and how monsters just keep coming. It works so well because you understand where Bryan is coming from. It’s the same kind of crap you’ll say to yourself while you’re playing the games. The film is enjoyable because it embraces the tone and style of the games even if it skips over the world.

With that said, the movie is still a tad uneven. The opening act, which takes place on the road to Racoon City and then at a farmhouse, is great. It’s creepy and thrilling, with a solid amount of action beats. But somewhere along the way, past a sequence in a highway tunnel and before the last act, the film starts to shift in tone. A character played by Paul Walter Hauser is introduced, and he’s too funny and weird to fit the tone of the film up to that point. His introduction begins to move the film from horror into horror-comedy and it never really shifts back. By the last act we’ve moved completely into a kind of action-comedy film, and while it’s amusing on its own, it feels a long way off from the thrills we were getting in the first part of the film.

And I don’t think the special effects really do the film justice, either. There are a lot of monsters in the film, but most of them are done with CGI instead of practical effects. In fairness, the movie was made on a (relatively) modest budget of $75 Mil, so they had to stretch that as far as they could for as many set pieces as there are in the film. Still, with a number of monsters feeling like they came out of The Thing playbook, twisting and splitting and getting very weird and gross, you would have liked to see more practical effects. Be like The Thing and not like The Thing.

Still, I would say that the film does work, act to act, on its own accord. So long as you go in knowing the film will shift in tone as it moves along you probably won’t be too annoyed by that. And, as many Resident Evil fans have noted, this does still work within the bounds of the game series. Generally you start off underpowered and scared of everything, but by the end of a game you’re dulled to the scares and so loaded for bear you don’t really worry about the monsters anymore. The tone shifts, sort of like how it shifts here, so maybe this was intentional.

And the movie is fun, even if it’s uneven. I was never bored, I enjoyed where the film went, and I generally liked the beats I was getting. This is a thrill ride kind of film, one that takes you on a journey and rarely stops. Whether it’s the exact kind of movie Resident Evil fans wanted is besides the point. This is certainly the most fun I’ve had with a Resident Evil film, ever. And I’ll take that over the consistent, if awful, slop the franchise used to put out any day of the week.