Zach Creeger’s Resident Evil is going to be VERY polarizing.
Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil Does Things VERY Differently
The Resident Evil reboot (or relaunch, or re-do, or re-whatever you want to call it) from Zach Cregger is going to make a lot of viewers happy and a lot of viewers angry. I guess the best way to posit it is like this: if you liked Weapons or Barbarian, you’re probably going to like this movie. And if you like the actual RE video games, well … your mileage will DEFINITELY vary.
For starters, the movie is only nominally based on the “RE” series. Yes, there are zombies, yes the Umbrella Corporation is involved, yes, there are a lot of mutated freaks of nature running round. Thematically, the Resident Evil games have always been a hybrid of Dawn of the Dead and Assault on Precinct 13 — i.e., stories about peacekeepers trying to maintain some semblance of law and order during apocalyptic times. Zach gets the apocalyptic times part of the equation right; by the time the movie is over, we’re basically in the midst of a snow-covered doomsday. But it’s the predicate about leading characters that makes this interpretation of Resident Evil unlike anything in the multimedia series that has come before it.
There is no Jill Valentine or Leon Kennedy or Chris Redfield in this movie. Rather, our central figure is a guy played by Austin Abrams. Is he a member of a secret military force? A police officer going through training day? An international spy? Good guesses, all of them, but he’s actually … a medical courier. Yes, it’s a zombie Armageddon movie where the savior of mankind is literally a dude who Ubers medical equipment for a living. As soon as I realized that HE was the main character of the film, I figured out what Zach was REALLY trying to do with the film.
This is basically his not-so-subtle attempt to make National Lampoon’s Resident Evil. It’s a self-parody in just about every way, from the dialogue to the over-the-top acting to the totally out of place screwball comedy segments. It’s a movie that feels more like that 1988 film Miracle Mile than it does any of the RE video games; it’s just a tongue-in-cheek story about an everyman who gets caught up in an apocalyptic scenario he can’t understand, let alone escape from.
This is the wedge that’s going to drive viewers to one side or the other. Some people are going to like that counter-intuitive approach to the material, and to be fair, the movie does have a couple of funny moments. That said, I can easily see how people expecting a more serious and faithful RE movie would hate the hell out of this film. It’s almost like the director went out of his way to make anything and everything BUT a traditional Resident Evil movie. Heck, it feels more like an unofficial adaptation of Silent Hill or Parasite Eve than RE — which, who knows, may have been intentional on Zach’s part.
I kinda get the feeling that Zach doesn’t quite appreciate video game culture as a “legitimate” art on par with cinema. He clearly doesn’t understand the nuances and details that make “RE” feel like “RE,” or else he just didn’t care about them. There’s a joke about the main character trying to find a key and employ resources from a first-aid kit that’s sort of a meta-joke about the unreality of video games. Later on, there’s even a brief sewer-scouring sequence filmed in first-person, just like it was Doom or Call of Duty or something. It seems like Zach was trying to make some sort of commentary about video games as a storytelling device, which is sort of an ironic situation considering the “RE” franchise itself is LITTERED with tropes and memetic content. I could tell Craig wasn’t a fan of the games simply because he didn’t make a SINGLE joke about mixing red herbs with green herbs, or how it’s possible for somebody to fit a rocket launcher inside a suitcase.
Structurally my biggest issue with the film is that it takes WAY too long to accelerate into full-on zombie apocalypse mode. You have to wait close to the thirty minute mark of the film before the first undead character shows up on screen and you can argue that things don’t get truly nightmarish on a grand scale until around the one hour mark … of a film that’s barely 90 minutes long. It would be one thing if Austin’s character was truly interesting, or funny or sympathetic, but he’s actually fairly bland and generic. He doesn’t seem particularly heroic or witty and for the most part, he manages to survive throughout the film due to blind luck. I mean, you wouldn’t really expect a sorta dull medical courier to be a zombie-slaying war machine or anything like that, but at times this film feels like nothing more than a slightly more serious homage to Shaun of the Dead.
The special effects, though, are pretty great. We get some neat looking body-horror-fueled monsters, including a monstrosity that might as well be the big studio, big-budget cousin to the Human Centipede. The undead creatures look appropriately gross and scuzzy and towards the end of the film it does turn into quite the bloodbath. If that’s all you’re looking for in a Resident Evil movie, than I suppose that makes Zach’s interpretation of the material a rousing success.
Personally, I wasn’t a fan of the ending. I guess you can’t expect a cheery, upbeat ending in a movie about chemical warfare zombies eating Colorado, but at the same time the finale here felt especially cynical and pessimistic. Saying anything more about the movie is total spoiler territory, so let me just put it like this: the original Return of the Living Dead literally ended with all of the characters getting obliterated by a nuclear strike, and that’s STILL a more chipper ending than what we get in this film.
I’m definitely one of those “in the middle” critics of the film. It does a lot of things very well but at the end of the day, it just doesn’t feel like it should’ve even been called Resident Evil in the first place. I wasn’t totally bored watching the film, but there were a few moments where I wondered to myself what could’ve been. I mean, is it really too late to get Leonardo Di Caprio for that LONG overdue, shot-for-shot live-action adaptation of Resident Evil 4?
GIVE IT A WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Fish out of water apocalypse stories, most of the 28 Days Later sequels, downer endings
DIRECTOR: Zach Cregger
WRITER(s): Zach Cregger, Shay Hatten
STARRING: Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, Paul Walter Hauser
STUDIO: Columbia Pictures/Constantin Film/Davis Film/Subconscious/Vertigo Entertainment/PlayStation Productions
DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Releasing
RUNTIME: 95 minutes
LANGUAGE: English
RELEASE DATE: September 18, 2026
