Zach Cregger’s horror–video game adaptation emerges as a gleefully pulpy comic spectacle.
At last, a movie aimed at players who love shooter titles but are famously imprecise with the aim.
Among the many running gags in the new Resident Evil, the one that lands with the most amusement is the hero’s chronic frustration with firearms. The courier named Bryan becomes entangled in a progression—from a pistol to a shotgun, and then to heavier gear—that mirrors a classic gaming power curve. He ransacks drawers for ammo and rations, maneuvers ladders placed for convenience, bangs through an absurd number of padlocked gates, and fights off all kinds of creepy-crawly horrors.
And throughout, his aim is woefully off, shooting mere inches from the target even at close quarters, and sometimes firing off the wrong weapon entirely for no discernible reason. (Controller quirks are nothing new to gamers.) He keeps admitting he doesn’t know how to handle guns, insisting to another character that he’s not a gun guy—he’s only used guns in video games. Ha, but…actually…ha ha.
If you’re the kind of person who relishes violent video games but isn’t very proficient at them, you’ve almost certainly found yourself muttering curses at the screen and at yourself as you miss obvious shots or blow through a new weapon while still figuring out its controls.
The distinction is that Bryan exists in a movie, not a game. Yet the film is built on a game‑based premise, and every experience is filtered, often hilariously, through that game‑lingo.
The repetitious misses and misfires are only one facet of the movie’s meta‑metafiction—a self-referential, gut‑busting romp drawn from the Resident Evil universe that converts gameplay into twisted, terrifying narrative turnings.
Most video‑game adaptations settle into one of two modes: either they recreate specific moments and sequences from the source material, as in the infamous first‑person sequence from the original Doom film, or they attempt to craft a character‑driven tale inside a nonsensical game world while dutifully sticking to its goofy lore, as seen in the recent Super Mario Bros. films and this year’s disappointing Mortal Kombat sequel.
The prior Resident Evil film franchise, spanning six entries led by Milla Jovovich and largely shaped by B‑movie maestro Paul W.S. Anderson, walked a middle line—leaning heavily on opaque lore while nodding to core concepts from the games. The films possessed a certain lowbrow charm, but they were fundamentally campy—goofy, trashy, pseudo‑serious video‑game cinema that leaned into their silliness and trashiness.
With his sharp new Resident Evil reboot, director Zach Cregger offers a fresh approach: he loosens the ties to the lore—the zombie‑like monstrosities, the unnervingly empty and creepily sunken Raccoon City, the Umbrella Corporation—and builds the film around a straightforward quest that plays out across discrete environments that could easily be levels the protagonist navigates. The film unfolds as a sequence of escalating trials and encounters, blending white‑knuckle combat, platforming sequences, and environmental puzzle solving. You’ve likely played something akin to this before, but rarely has it felt so cinematic.
I’d argue Cregger is the first director to fashion a feature that truly plays like a game; still, the little‑seen Exit 8 beat him to the punch earlier this year, and the Portal‑inspired Backrooms—though not a direct adaptation of a video game—came quite close too.
Yet Cregger outshines them through his sheer velocity—the film clocks in at a tight 90 minutes—and through inventive humor, treating the game‑like scenarios as real challenges to overcome while also underscoring their comic absurdity. Before he became a horror auteur with Barbarian and Weapons, Cregger belonged to a sketch‑comedy troupe, The Whitest Kids U’ Know, and that sensibility shows. Each “level” in his Resident Evil unfolds as a tiny sketch, a chain of increasingly ridiculous yet somehow plausibly‑presented yes‑and moments stacking atop one another until the entire sequence collapses and the next level begins.
I’m not sure how this movie will land with non‑gamers who have never muttered curses while accidentally blasting a freshly upgraded gun into a wall, or who fail to line up a shot as a hidden monster sneaks in. This is very much a picture for those who know how satisfying it is to time a complex sequence of jumps with perfect precision.
Resident Evil is the rare video‑game adaptation that respects the language of games even as it knowingly reshapes that language into delightfully unhinged pulp cinema, as if John Carpenter had crafted a shock‑comedy version of Doom.
Toward the film’s end, the hero, just after taking down a major monster, belts out “VIDEOOOOO GAAAAAAMES.” As a climactic slogan, it’s a touch on the nose, but it’s also perfectly apt. This film is about a guy who, like many of us, can’t shoot straight. Yet the movie hits its mark with uncanny accuracy.
