Resident Evil has shuffled back into theaters, and against long odds, critics are largely embracing it. Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil movie for Sony is now playing, and the reception has been strong enough that weekend coverage crowned it the best-reviewed live-action video game movie ever made — even as the adaptation’s bold comedic swerve is splitting the fanbase.
A Medical Courier Walks Into Raccoon City
The film follows Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier who spends his nights delivering cooled organs and the like to hospitals in and around Raccoon City. He was already having a stressful night when he was contracted to deliver a mysterious, high-priority medical package to the origin point of Resident Evil 2‘s outbreak — and things spiral from there. On the drive in, while juggling a strained phone call with his girlfriend Michelle about their future, Bryan hits a woman who mindlessly walks out into the road. She’s miraculously still alive; she also spends the entire car ride grabbing at him while strapped in by her seatbelt. The viewer knows exactly what she’s infected with. Bryan does not.
It’s at this point the movie shows its hand: this is not a faithful retelling of Capcom’s zombie soap opera, but an Evil Dead-style absurdism that leans into the unflinching slapstick comedy of Cregger’s Whitest Kids U’Know days.
An Adaptation of Playing, Not the Plot
Kotaku’s review calls the film “less an adaptation of the series than a vibes-based homage” — a 95-minute grotesque comedy that borrows the aesthetics of the games while rarely taking itself too seriously. Bryan is an incompetent, often hilarious everyman — “an absolute dumbass,” in the review’s words — who stammers, swears and sprints his way through nightmares of human hubris, coming out the other side like a Looney Tunes character. Some of the creatures he faces reportedly surpass the horrors of recent Resident Evil games, though the film’s refusal to hold tension for more than a moment keeps it from feeling truly terrifying.
And the comedy was even dialed back during production: Cregger previously revealed he “stripped out” a bunch of jokes because test audiences found an earlier cut “too funny” — and says he doesn’t miss “a single joke” that was removed for the final film.
Critics Convinced, Fans Divided
The critical reception has been remarkably warm. Early reviews hailed the film as “a clever homage that doesn’t get bogged down by the details,” with one critic writing that “this is how movies and video games can merge in a way that makes them stronger.” Forbes wrote that the movie “may have cracked the code” for making a great video game film, and by Sunday, coverage had declared it the best-reviewed live-action video game movie to date.
The fanbase is more split. As Kotaku reported, the humor and ending divide Resident Evil fans on Cregger’s film — with some arguing “the movie can be renamed into anything else and make as much sense” — while defenders point to it as one of the freshest takes on the franchise in years.
While Hollywood reinvents Raccoon City on screen, the games are thriving too — Capcom’s Resident Evil Requiem brought the series’ survival horror back earlier this year.