Resident Evil (2026)

This movie is the exact opposite of competency porn. Turns out I also love movies about an idiot NPC who stumbles through the worst night of his life.

I went in as a guy who has Resident Evil 4 in his top five games of all time. Leon Kennedy is my guy. But, Fuck Leon, because THIS MOVIE RIPS. This isn’t a faithful adaptation and it DOESNT NEED TO BE. Cregger and co-writer Shay Hatten built something that works on its own terms, whether or not you’ve ever picked up a controller.

Weapons built its structure around shifting perspective across multiple characters. The problem Cregger set himself here is different: make an audience root for An incompetent idiot who lies to his girlfriend, makes openly selfish choices, kills children and babies and dogs, and still holds the screen. Austin Abrams is why it works. He plays Bryan without making him cute about any of it, without the small self-aware winks that usually give the audience permission to keep liking a bad person. You stay with Bryan because Abrams refuses to make it easy. Cregger keeps finding different structural problems to solve, film by film, and still doesn’t get enough credit for it as a writer.

Horror-comedies tend to drop the comedy somewhere in the second act, when the stakes arrive. Cregger never lets that happen here. The whole theater was dying (with laughter) from beginning to end, including me. Ninety-four minutes of consistent laughs (and scares) in a horror film is rarer than people give it credit for.

More than any Resident Evil film (or frankly any video game adaptation) before it, this one captures what it feels like to play the games: limited resources, terrible odds, locks on every doors, limited ammo, and Bryan might actually die in that dark hallway. The Easter eggs are fun and completely unnecessary to enjoy the film for the newly inducted into the RE universe, which is exactly how adaptation should work. The film works independently of whether you’ve ever heard of Raccoon City, or ever stopped at a typewriter.

Stray observations:

• shoutout to the score
• as a Minnesota boy, shoutout to the snow; CGI or not, it’s perfect
• shoutout to Blank Check
• doesn’t top Barbarian or Weapons for me, but the most purely fun I’ve had in a theater in a while; already ready for a rewatch.

Also on Letterboxd