2026 was already a banner year for the video game movie. Specifically when it comes to quality. Iron Lung started the trend. Exit 8 and Backrooms upped the ante. And for the big finale, gamer world lured Zach Cregger to make his own movie version of Resident Evil. So when we get 38 Mario Galaxies and 35 Sonic the Hedgehogs, plus the Pong Trilogy, just remember that Cregger is the Umbrella Corporation of this movie bioweapon now unleashed on the populous.
This movie is not based on any previous Resident Evil lore, it’s a new thing. But the story will be familiar to any fans. Bryan (Austin Abrams) is a medical courier finishing his last delivery for the night. That is, until a doctor at his hospital gives him a grade A package that pays double. Only issue, it’s gotta be delivered to Raccoon City, not an ideal location if you have any brains at all.
But for Cregger, Bryan doesn’t. And that’s the lead of his Resident Evil tale, even dumber than Ethan, one of the dumbest video game characters in recent memory. Zach’s challenge is this: he wants to make Bryan feel like an everyday person so we feel like he’s one of us, but not SO dumb we start eye rolling and start hoping he dies. Fortunately, Cregger’s best characters in Barbarian and Weapons are his affable idiots. Austin Abrams is Cregger’s muse I guess, just altering his performance as Bryan for a longer window of time. When he picks up a ladder and throws it to try to hurt something chasing him that’s smart; not realizing he’d need the ladder to climb back down doesn’t occur to him until he looks out and says “well f*ck.” Abrams is great at looking like he might screw you over but inevitably has a good heart, perfect for a video gameish lead. Bryan might stay a little too long somewhere cause he’s oblivious to the danger he’s in, but every now & again he’ll watch a body get teased into darkness, and he’ll just slowly back away and decide on another less dangerous path to save a life/restart. Most of his choices are defensible, and Abrams does a hell of a job carrying a movie where he’s mostly on his own trying to get from point A to point B.
It’s then up to Zach Cregger to build the puzzle boxes Abrams has to escape from. The director’s played a bunch of these games, because he’s distilled the movie into its pure essences. The only lore “homework” if there is any is that there are zombies to worry about: that’s tidy and easy for a mainstream audience. As for the tale: like all Resident Evils, it starts from a small place and slowly builds bigger and bigger as the stakes grow. Cregger concocts some devilish scenarios that will set your skin on edge. We get it all for a horror movie: there’s big jump scares, there’s the slow motion car wrecks that have you covering your face, and there’s the real deranged gross body horror. The last is the most important to get right for Resident Evil to work. That warped Cregger mind has a little something different, from one scene to the next. He nails the game’s build up of one mutated enemy Mr. X style following our hero, as well as a series of creatures that flirt with the poor taste line but always somehow end up on the right side of it. And at a tight 90 minutes, it’s always on the run and never outstays its welcome to point out all the little RE easter eggs, of which there are too many to count.
Now that Cregger’s got Resident Evil out of his system, I can’t wait for his space horror movie. This guy’s clearly overflowing with creativity, and if he keeps it up will end up at worst one of the great horror creators of our time, and maybe even something more than that. And poor Austin Abrams should make his money playing dirtbags and whale prey now, before that affability turns into some sort of cruel cosmic joke that I hope never comes.