After months of speculation, we have finally seen Zack Gregger’s Resident evil. I’ll be honest, I thought it was a good movie overall, and maybe the best movie that has the words ‘Resident Evil’ in the title, but that doesn’t mean it was a good ‘Resident Evil movie’.
You see, when this was first announced and shown off in trailers, Cregger was saying that this would be a movie that storyline wise would fit in next to the actual game series. As I was writing this review, I figured I had better pull the quote and I immediately found one. This comes from an article on Polygon from April:
“I wanted to construct a story that could live in the world of Resident Evil and kind of be on the periphery of the events of Resident Evil 2, where Raccoon City is having its big night, but tell just another story that could be happening in parallel, that really honors the vibe and the pacing you get when you play the games,” Cregger said.
And this is my issue with this movie. It categorically could not live in any version of the universe of the games – original psone series or modern remakes.
Then a few weeks before the movie was released, there was another trailer where people complained that there was a modern cell phone, and the events seem to take place in the snow which doesn’t match up with the setting of the games and the outbreak in Racoon City. Cregger seems to then say that this is a story that would have the vibe of the games and make you feel the same as you feel when you play the games rather than actually storyline wise match up.
This was a big warning bell to me, although I could maybe forgive if they set the film in the modern day rather than in 1998. Snow, maybe that would be ok too. Although that would very much change the visual look of the outbreak that it’s not unreasonable to say that fans would have wanted to see realised on screen.
And let’s face it, the original series of films based on Resident Evil were very much their own thing and whilst popular action movies, what fans really wanted was an adaptation of the games. The first reboot Welcome to Racoon City was a lot closer to the games, but came out during the pandemic and completely rushed the storyline where they condensed the first three games into one movie. They also took liberties with characters, most notably Leon who they portrayed as an idiot.
So, would this film finally get things right? Yes and no, but more no than anything.
I’ll clarify, even though this article and review seems negative so far, I actually thought this was a very good movie…for the most part. I think the opening 45 minutes were pretty great in fact. Then for some reason, it had a ten minute comedy sketch, just to get mostly back on track and then have a rather rushed and unsatisfactory ending which was equal parts comedy as it was action…but little horror.
My issue comes in that it completely failed in it’s promise to be a movie that lives in the world of Resident Evil. The problems are many, so let’s go through them.
To start with, the movie follows a new character Bryan, who is a medical courier who is tasked with taking something to Racoon City in bad weather.
So, like Resident Evil 2, with Leon and Claire being characters from outside Racoon City, he arrives in to discover that all hell is breaking loose. But unlike most lead characters from Resident Evil, he’s not a bad ass. He doesn’t know how to use a gun, and for the most part his constantly muttering f this and f that just makes him seem like comic relief.
He then whilst driving through snow hits into a woman, and even though there is a scene where Leon gets out his car to look at a zombie at the start of Resi 2, the bad weather, woman rush out in the middle of the road was much closer to the start of Silent Hill…
As everyone would expect watching the film, this would turn out to be a zombie, although the film immediately goes more for comedy in that the zombie woman seems stunned, for some reason, and he puts her in his car next to him to take her to the hospital. After a minute of driving and sliding on the road, Bryan is pulled over by a cop who says he’ll escort Bryan to the hospital, but Bryan asks that the cop take the woman he hit.
A minute later the cop car flips over and the cop is killed in the crash (no zombie moment) and the zombie woman disappears. When she re-emerges she chases Bryan by running, which for the Resi games makes no sense for a zombie, unless they were to say she was a crimson head variant, but they do nothing to explain how come she can run. Bryan gets the cop’s gun and shoots her, but because he’s bad with guns, he also shoots up his car.
He then heads to a near by farm house, and we get more comedy moments as Bryan has to navigate over an electric fence. And look, some of these early comedy moments are passable without it just seeming silly, but a lot of the tone is just showing Bryan being a clumsy unlikely hero.
As Bryan goes towards the house a dog chases him and attacks him and we then get the reveal that despite looking like a completely normal non dead dog, the dog is a monster dog whose head splits open and wormy tentacles shoot out and try to grab Bryan.
This was a great big ‘huh’ moment from me in the cinema as the way the dog looks and its head split open didn’t look anything like how the zombie dogs should be during the outbreak of Racoon City which is depicted in Resident Evil 2.
Instead, the way the zombie dog looked was both exactly like the dogs infected with the Las Plagas parasite from Resident Evil 4, which if you weren’t aware, is set 7 years after the outbreak in Resident Evil 2.
Interestingly, the dog also looked like it had come straight out of the movie The Thing, which isn’t a bad thing in itself, but immediately it put in my mind that Cregger seems to be making a sequel to The Thing rather than an adaptation of Resident Evil.
My third thought on the dog was that the Nemesis monster from Resident Evil 3 does have wormy tentacles, so maybe this would be in some way linked to Nemesis.
Nope.
Bryan gets into the farm house and finds it’s been trashed and seemingly abandoned. He leaves a voicemail for his girlfriend and then spots that the zombie woman is back up and running across the snow towards the house where he is. The film has a really good jump scare here when a zombie guy attacks Bryan, but it’s where the film revealed one of its biggest head scratching revelations.
The zombies aren’t zombies.
The woman comes in the room, and Bryan blasts her head off with a shotgun, and then wormy tentacles come out of her neck and attach to the dead guy. They then combine together to become some kind of amalgamation creature…which with one being picked up and being pulled into the neck of the movie very much echoed a scene from…The Thing,.,
Why Cregger? Just get the rights to The Thing and make a sequel to that if you were that desperate to.
But just to clarify my earlier statement, these tentacles mean that these monsters aren’t zombies as we’ve ever had in the Resident Evil games, and are instead once again like the Las Plagas parasite monsters from Resident Evil 4. And Resident Evil 4 famously didn’t have zombies, but it did have smarter infected humans who would run after you just like these non-zombies in this film.
We then see a photo that the woman he hit lived at this house, and Bryan has killed her, her husband, and their dog.
Bryan leaves the house and we get the first of many recurring gags where he failed to shoot a padlock. Now, I’d guess this is meant to be a reference to the games where you have to find keys and unlock things, but it was just turned into a running gag rather than truly build tension.
Bryan then goes on foot, still carrying the mystery delivery he was taking to Racoon City Hospital. I’ll be honest, I have abandoned it and just worried about getting myself somewhere safe, but this delivery later turns out to be central to the plot as it contains a vial of something that could be a cure for the virus…but what virus it is in this movie is anyone’s guess.
Bryan goes into a blocked tunnel where an RV completely blocks the way, and so Bryan tries to see if he can go all the way through when he discovers a little girl whose mother bit her. He then spots that the little girl is mutating and have tentacle like extremities coming out of her foot.
But she’s still talking…so not a zombie at all and even more evidence that it’s some variant of the Las Plagas storyline which skips over everything to do with the T or G viruses form the games.
This girl’s face opened up and is a monster and she bites him, which will eventually lead to his downfall. This infection wasn’t much beyond Nick Fury losing his eye to a cat in Captain Marvel in terms of it being a bit dumb. I guess Cregger wanted you to think that Bryan would look after the girl like this was the Last of Us, or the Tell Tales Walking Dead game, but instead she is a one scene character that bites him so eventually he can mutate like the guy in District 9, and not at any point turn into a zombie like in Resident Evil.
So, after Bryan kills the girl, he is then confronted with the comedy fat bloke from Cobra Kai, Paul Walker Hauser who it turns out works for Umbrella and has caused the outbreak by having a simple lab accident. No conspiracy. No making the ultimate biological weapon and unleashing it on special forces people as test subjects from the actual games, but a clumsy comedy fat bloke.
Fat Albert Wesker is accompanied by the closest we get to a S.T.A.R.S team member in the movie who is a bad ass Umbrella enforcer played by Kali Reis.
They drive to Racoon City where Fat Albert Wesker then says they need to take the vial Bryan is carrying to the Umbrella lab at the top of a tower block.
The film even points out the stupidness of them just using a courier to get the vial, and its utter plot convenience that Bryan is in this story at all, as there’s no way all this outbreak has happened in the time since he started driving to Racoon City.
The Hunkette then gets out the car when we see a few people running from “zombies” and she just abandons Fat Albert Wesker and takes the car keys with her. Hunkette disappears and then we have a much too long comedy sketch routine between Bryan, who by the way, had previously played the comedy drug addict in Zach Cregger’s Weapons, which was probably my favourite movie of 2025.
Bryan goes to look for Hunkette and finds that he has been cut in half by the amalgamation monster which by this point is chasing after Bryan like one of the stalker monsters from the games like Mr X, Nemesis, Lady Dimitrescu.
Unlike any of the stalkers form those games, the amalgamation monster is actually more like a giant zombie tumblewood that just rolls along and picks up any zombies it rolls over.
Now, people online have said that it’s like the monster the Nyx from Resident Evil Outbreak File #2, but I invite you to watch that creature from that game and it’s nothing like Cregger’s creature. And besides, if anything the amalgamation creature is more like the Blair Monster from…you guessed it, The Thing. Especially after it then absorbs Fat Albert Wesker and we see his face from within the creature which actually makes it a bit like the Absorbaloff from Doctor Who, which was the worst episode of the show up until the god awful Thirteenth Doctor era.
From Here Bryan then goes down a snowy street where he sees “zombies” who hurl themselves off of tall building at him like lemmings…for some reason.
Bryan makes it to the tower building where the lab is and takes a pause in the action to take his shirt off and Adam Cole the heck out of his physique for the cameras. He sees that he has dark veins spreading up his arm where he was bitten, but then hears someone speaking to him on an intercom.
This turns out to be another comedy fat bloke, this time from the Apple TV show Severance who is the main scientist working on whatever virus this is that has been unleashed on Racoon City, and he wants Bryan to bring it up to the top floor laboratory.
Now, normally in Resident Evil games we have underground laboratories, but Cregger wanted to take the gotta go up a lot of stairs in a tower block routine from Ghostbusters.
So he heads up, but for some reason, to get to the Umbrella Corporation’s lab where they make deadly viruses, the only way to get there is to go up 24 floors, then cross a sky bridge and then up a few more floors to where these biological weapons are being created.
Oh, and by the way, the only way to get there is through a maternity ward…which for some reason leads directly onto a sky bridge. So, Bryan doesn’t follow advice and goes in an elevator which actually would have been completely fine if it were now for a puking zombie which vomits bucket fulls of acid which is corrosive enough to burn through the metal of the lift so there is almost none of it left, but doesn’t burn through the zombie itself. So, this vomit acid is even more powerful than the xenomorph blood from Alien, and Bryan just headlocks the vomit zombie and makes it puke on the amalgamation zombie which is still following Bryan for…reasons.
Going through the maternity ward we get a room full of zombie babies, but only see one for a moment which has mutated into another variant zombie monster that doesn’t come from the game. But remember when there were monster zombie toddlers in Silent Hill? Just saying.
For the second time in ten minutes, Bryan utilises other zombie to knock down the amalgamation monster. This time finally being good with a gun and shooting a door barricade he himself put on the maternity ward door a minute earlier. I can understand why he did it, but as they smashed through the doors and just tumbled down on top of the amalgamation monster like oh no more lemmings,
Bryan then edges his way across the sky bridge which is almost completely broken and missing for reasons not explained at all, and he finally makes it to the lab. They let him in and there was a decent call back joke about someone signing for the delivery which hadn’t happened at the start of the film when he delivered something else to a different hospital. Unfortunately, they kind of kill this moment when he actually looks like he’s going to get a sheet for them to sign for the delivery in the next scene which was just dumb in the given circumstances.
From here the film spirals towards it’s end where we see the guy from Severance do most of the talking for the scientists who all seem to ponder why they let Bryan in, but at the same time not pay enough attention to him to spot that he’s turning into a William Birkin like tyrant…for some reason.
I mean, Bryan didn’t die. He continues to talk and asks for some of the cure that they seem to be able to put together almost instantly. So Bryan never becomes a zombie, but he does mutate into something like William Birkin, but also have stretchy Mr Fantastic limbs like a Bandersnatch from Resident Evil Code Veronica…which at this stage I think is just a coincidence and don’t really believe in my heart that Zach Cregger even knows the Resident Evil games, let alone has actually played them.
Just like the earlier comedy fat bloke, the scientist one just seems to instruct others to do dangerous things so he can stay safe, but then the Severance guy gets squashed by a table. This just leaves a couple of science guys who are clearly red shirt security and just cannon fodder for Bryan to kill.
The film quickly comes to an end with them dropping the cure before they manage to inject Bryan and showing him now fully transformed into a tyrant like monster.
But look, whilst I’ve had fun pointing out the film’s many flaws, I can honestly say that if it wasn’t for the detours of humour, the film was genuinely good. The first 45 minutes were damn good in fact, but to be honest I said that the first half an hour of Zach Cregger’s Barbarian was also really good, but then it fell off a building like a zombie lemming just as this did.
It’s a shame, but unless this makes a ton of money, I already get the sense that Cregger is sick of the backlash about the revelation that it isn’t faithful to the games at all, and so the chances of a sequel are low from him. How anyone else would follow this up is a bit of a mystery to me, as this is at least as nothing to do with the canon of the games as the Mila Jovovich movies, if not more. So I think the most likely option is that we’ll get another reboot, or someone will have to pick up this story and new established lore and try to make a sequel that like the Jovovich films will probably start cramming in known characters to just try to appease a fan base who watched the first film and all collectively said where’s Leon and Chris?
In conclusion
I thought the film was really good in terms of atmosphere and it was well made and some of the scares were very good. I can’t give it five stars as the humour was bad and the ending was rushed. I mean, we didn’t even have the amalgamation monster as the final boss or get Bryan’s storyline resolved in any way after the whole film made it about him wanting to get to his pregnant girlfriend.
I will say that as a Resident Evil film, I give it one star, which is one more than the number of S.T.A.R.S team that appears in the film. It just isn’t almost anything to do with the story of the games. Nor did the film actually capture the atmosphere of any of the games as in none of the games do you play as a loser character instead of a bad ass.
The film could easily be retooled with minimal reshoots for this to be a sequel to The Thing, which like this movie had a cold and snowy setting and monsters reminiscent of those seen in this.
So, there you have it. Good horror movie. Terrible Resident Evil movie.
Star rating as a Resident Evil film:
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