Movie Review: Resident Evil (2026)

Resident Evil
Release Date: September 17, 2026
Writers: Zach Cregger, Shay Hatten
Director: Zach Cregger
Studio: Columbia Pictures, Constantin Films, Davis Films, Vertigo Entertainment, & PlayStation Productions
Distributor: Sony Pictures Releasing
Run Time: 90 Minutes

[It's been a while since we last did a Movie Review article- six years, in fact, which actually coincides pretty well with when COVID-19 hit and when The Squire was born.  Since then, Conklederp and I haven't been out to the movies very often, and seeing as how Resident Evil is a video game movie, I thought it the perfect time to get back to this long-running, often neglected series.]

I thought the movie was alright.  Not great, not terrible, just alright.  But before we go any further, I need to get this out of the way.

My feelings about this movie have nothing to do with Zach Cregger's comment about the story taking place concurrently with the events in Resident Evil 2.  They have nothing to do with the characters using "modern" technology, e.g., smartphones that wouldn't have existed in 1998.  They have nothing to do with the box of shotgun shells not existing in the canonical timeline until Resident Evil 4.  They have nothing to do with the fact that it's snowing in the movie and the canonical events of Resident Evil 2 take place from September 29-30, 1998; also see the first sentence.  They have nothing to do with there not being any characters from any of the games in the movie.  They have nothing to do with Leon Kennedy or Claire Redfield not being in the movie (see the above sentence).

The tl;dr before we even get to the meat of the article is that I went into Resident Evil expecting a tense survival-horror film, and instead I watched a comedy with tense survival-horror elements with great character design and makeup effects that might have been (slightly) ruined by the movie's advertising campaign, of which I was a very obvious target demographic; meaning my social media feeds often contained targeted ads for Resident Evil. (Can a tl;dr be too long?)

My two biggest critiques of the movie were that I found it to have too many comedic moments/elements and, likely due to my own fault, watching/engaging with too many of the trailers led me to recognize too many scenes while watching the movie.

From this point on, there will be spoilers sprinkled throughout, so you know:

~SPOILERS~

I get that part of Zach Cregger's approach to his vision of what would make for an effective Resident Evil movie is that he wanted the main character not to be a Leon Kennedy, but to be the person playing/surviving within the world of Resident Evil, and I really like that approach to a horror movie.  This is essentially what led to the actionification of the Resident Evil and Dead Space games and the original Evil Dead movies.  You have a consistent main character(s) who grow accustomed and experienced with the repeated enemies and situations they find themselves in, and so the horror is diminished because once you've experienced one zombie/necromorph/deadite outbreak, you've been through them all.  All of that to say, having the medical courier Bryan be the main character, a regular person who's never fired a gun before in their life, being placed in a situation where they not only have to fire a gun, but fire it at a person-shaped monster would be an incredibly horrific experience.

Or it would have been a horrific experience if so many of the moments hadn't been played for laughs.

After his first run-in with an infected/zombie, Bryan had fired wildly because he was panicking; he was running away from the creature, he was inexperienced with a gun, and the recoil from shooting a gun (with one hand?) was more than he had been expecting.  After killing the creature, he returns to his car, which won't start.  This part felt tense because the creature had already gone through a "fake death" scene, and it's implied that it could happen again; coupled with a long shot of the flipped-over police cruiser, the snowy field in the middle of nowhere, and at least two dead bodies is perfect setup to continue to build tension.  Bryan leaves the car to examine it and notices that there are bullet holes in the hood, presumably having permanently damaged the engine.  He makes the connection between his haphazard firing and the holes, and it comes across as a womp-womp moment.

In another scene, Bryan is escaping from a farmhouse and, while sitting in a purring 1980s-style Ford pickup truck (it's the type of sound that lets you know the truck is full of gas and has recently been serviced because there's no rattling or knocking noise when he starts the engine), he notices a locked gate in front of him.  He goes to check the closed gate and sees the giant padlock and chain securing the gate.  I did appreciate the diamond symbol on the lock; nice callback.  Bryan considers going back into the farmhouse where he last encountered a newer creature (yes, that one, which we'll get to later), but instead tries shooting the lock, but the lock holds.  In desperation, he drives the truck into the gate, but the lock holds and lifts up the truck with the dented frame of the gate, disabling the truck.  Upon climbing out of the stalled truck, a key falls out of the truck with a diamond shape at the end of it.  Womp-womp.

Late in the movie, Bryan is told that he needs to climb up 24 flights of stairs to get to his destination, and while he does make an appropriate stink about having to climb 24 flights of stairs, it seems a bit overdone as far as his reaction goes.  We then see a short montage of him climbing stairs, passing doors and floor signs to show progression.  The scene stops when Bryan himself stops, clearly out of breath, looks at a door, and it says "4th Floor."  Womp-womp.

Bryan manages to flank a creature that projectile regurgitates gallons of acidic vomit.  He then grabs the creature around the neck, then points the creature's head down an elevator chute so that it spews its acidic vomit at another massive pursuing monster.  He pushes the creature down the elevator chute, then delivers a one-line quip.  While not quite a womp-womp moment, it still feels played for laughs and a "fuck yeah!" moment for both the character and the audience, which ties back to my comment about the progression in previous RE games transitioning from horror to action, and this felt a lot like that.

My other critique is partly my own fault from watching several of the trailers that were released, as well as shorts that came up on my various social media feeds.  Part of it was that I wanted to know whether the Resident Evil movie I was getting hyped for would be false hype based on the last handful of live-action RE attempts, but that ended up with a lot of scenes rolling around in my head when I watched the movie.  During the aforementioned farmhouse scene, there's a shot where two bodies pull themselves together like something that would've been in Resident Evil 4, and I immediately thought, "Oh, so that's how that creature in the trailers is going to come about."  And when Bryan was outside the farmhouse, and the camera cut to the open farmhouse door, I thought, "Oh, it's going to be that shot from the trailer."  And it was.

After Bryan made it into Raccoon City, he eventually found his way to the sewers, and apart from thinking, "Oh yeah, Leon and Claire go into the sewers in Resident Evil 2," I thought, "Oh, this is going to be the scene with the giant bloated pale guy."  And it was.  To me, what felt like it should have been a slow and terrifying reveal of this static creature deep in the bowels of the dark sewer turned into another, "Ah yeah, this scene from the trailer."  This really annoyed me because, as someone who loves survival-horror (and just straight-up horror) video games, seeing a grotesque sight like this creature at the end of a long hallway, not moving at all as the main character slowly moves towards it, should have been absolutely terrifying.

My last example (although there are a few others) is what's been referred to as Jump Street.  Where Bryan is sprinting down a street filled with cars, and zombies/creatures are jumping/throwing themselves off of building roofs and splattering on the ground within inches of the actor/character.  Once again, when the camera panned up (I think it panned up; I've only seen the movie once, last Thursday, and I'm trying to do this all from memory) to show this gauntlet of buildings leading to Bryan's destination, I thought, "Oh, this is the blood bag scene."  "This is the scene where Austin Abrams was six inches away from getting crushed by one of the practical effects, a 200lb human-sized bag of blood, because it was accidentally released too early."

As mentioned above, there were quite a lot of things I did actually enjoy about the movie, although I won't be covering as much ground here because it's rather difficult to keep repeating "I really liked..." and to keep the remainder of the article interesting.  But I did really like the approach to telling a story, either told within the Resident Evil universe or, at the very least, that had a lot of the spirit of the games; eg having the main character be an inexperienced medical courier.  I also really liked the monster designs, how they felt novel and unique to this story, even when several of the designs felt like they were heavily referenced by Las Plagas in Resident Evil 4.  I loved the design of the creature in the farmhouse picture and how it evolved throughout the movie, which reminded me a bit of the end of INSIDE, albeit with a significantly higher Dex score and modifier.  

I liked a lot of the easter eggs, like the diamond key and lock, and the weapon progression from handgun to shotgun to SMG.  I liked that there were a lot of padlocks blocking Bryan's progression into different areas, even though how he called out the world for there being so many padlocks was played for laughs.  I liked the attention to detail with Bryan frequently checking the number of bullets he has left in his pistol and constantly being worried about when to use his last few remaining shots after running out of ammunition for the shotgun (more like losing them on the road as they tumbled out of his pocket) and SMG.

I also really liked the audio work throughout the movie.  I know there was music in the movie because I was deathly aware whenever sound cut out, but I can't recall any specific music cues.  That's not meant to be a dig at either composer, Hays or Ryan Holladay, because effective horror music is supposed to keep you within the movie and not take you out of it.  The lack of music, even if it was ambient drone music, helped create a feeling that something bad was about to happen, and it usually did; it also unfortunately meant that you could slightly hear audio from the other screens on either side of the theater we were in.

I feel bad about having been disappointed in Resident Evil.  I had gone into it expecting a survival-horror movie, one that was focused on the survival of the main character under horrific circumstances, and to a certain extent, it was.  But it was also a comedy at almost every other turn.  Bryan swore left and right, which someone in that situation would likely be doing, but it felt like it was used to cut the tension, and the tension was never allowed to build for more than a minute or two.  The original Resident Evil indeed drew from B-movie roots like The Blob, Night of the Living Dead, and Dawn of the Dead, where the quality of the acting was overshadowed by the next scream and the next appearance of the monster.  I think if I had known ahead of time that Zach Cregger's take on Resident Evil, even after knowing that he had cut most of the jokes out of the movie, was going to be a comedy with survival-horror elements, I might have had a better time than I ended up having.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Given the Chance Would I Return?

P.S.  And for anyone who cares, I gave it a 7/10 rating on IMDb.

[All pictures after the first picture are copyright “Resident Evil” (YouTube/Sony Pictures Releasing)]