Review – Resident Evil (2026)

I remember years ago having two remarkably different experiences with the Resident Evil franchise. As a high schooler, I impulse bought the game Operation Raccoon City and it rapidly became one of my biggest regretful gaming purchases. Years later, I purchased and played the original Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube and loved it. These diametric experiences seemed to capture the breadth of the public’s reaction to the overall franchise. It’s broken schlock on one end of the spectrum, and surprisingly fun schlock on the other. Watching the RedLetterMedia guys go insane about how bad the movies were also impacted my opinion, given that it showed that the problems weren’t limited to video games. This is a franchise with remarkable potential, but it has been mishandled enough to make new entries worrisome.

Content Guide

Violence/Scary Images: Severe bloody violence with human gore. Bodies are blown apart by guns or falls, showcasing missing limbs. Plenty of body horror imagery.
Language/Crude Humor: Severe language including repeated uses of f*** and s***.
Drug/Alcohol References: Limited to none.
Sexual Content: A major plot point in the film is a boyfriend and girlfriend discussing unexpected extramarital pregnancy and abortion. Nothing is depicted.
Spiritual Content: Limited to none.
Other Negative Content: Potentially extreme visual content at the viewer’s discretion. City-wide mismanagement.
Positive Content: Themes of maturity, taking responsibility, and the cost of sin.

Review

I don’t think it is unfair to describe the Resident Evil franchise at this point as convoluted. After nearly three decades of entries going back to the original PlayStation, the beloved Capcom series has developed what Yahtzee Croshaw once described as a cancerous mass of lore that the franchise’s best entries are best to ignore. Certainly, this is true of its most popular entries. Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil 7, and the remake of Resident Evil 2 are beloved because they’re accessible action-horror games. Conversely, entries like Resident Evil 6 and Operation Raccoon City that lean into the insane lore are hated.

The same is also true for the films. The famous six Paul W.S. Anderson-Milla Jovovich collaborations were a major Hollywood action franchise from 2002 to 2017, often combining the most excessive traits of mainstream blockbusters with the most convoluted elements of the franchise’s lore to achieve movies that could best be described as Matrix-knockoffs.

It was fascinating then to hear the early rumbling for the newest film in the franchise—an outright reboot of the story from a totally new creative team and direction. This shouldn’t have been surprising though given the talent behind it. One time Friends With Benefits director Zach Creggor had built a remarkable name for himself in the past few years as the mind behind the horror movies Weapons and Barbarian. He is one of the few people in Hollywood one can trust with a project like this, and he knocked it out of the park.

The story is set just upon the cusp of the original Umbrella Corporation outbreak in Raccoon City. Our protagonist is Bryan, a young professional driver who is tasked with transporting human organs between hospitals. When he’s given a high paid opportunity to drive an urgent package to the remote Raccoon City Hospital in the mountains, he takes the job against the advice of his girlfriend. As becomes clear, she has discovered he has gotten her pregnant and is threatening to leave him as his reluctance to embrace responsibility for the baby is harming their relationship. Unfortunately, this is further shaken when a car accident places Bryan in the center of a seeming zombie outbreak with no clue what to do or how to survive.

From the outset, Bryan is not portrayed as a particularly moral or competent character. His first onscreen act is to lie on his paperwork. He’s clearly impulsive, incompetent, impatient, and unwilling to do the right thing when called upon. He is young, but his anxiety and failures become a frequent motif throughout the film. From the frequent use of baby imagery to his one-sided conversations with his girlfriend, it is clear throughout that his tortured conscious is manifesting in the challenges that surround him.

Cleverly, the film also uses this fumbling to its advantage. Bryan is a terrible protagonist for a zombie survival movie. He can’t shoot a gun. He mostly survives by dumb luck. Most of the time, he makes his life harder by making decisions that he immediately regrets, like trying to injure a guard dog with a ladder he immediately realizes he needs to use. There are tons of clever setups and payoffs throughout the film, and much of it benefits from the slow burn tension and the gradual reveal of what ultimately comes about with its well done finale. It proves to be a bittersweet morality tale about the cost of running from one’s sins and the degree to which they can be redeemed, which is appropriate for a film where the protagonist is purposefully kind of stupid. It smartly uses emotionally unintelligent characters.

Much like the best Resident Evil content though, it is entirely standalone. I’m sure there are details for the franchise faithful to pull apart, but there is nothing in this film that a casual horror fan wouldn’t be able to understand entirely through its cinematic language and brief exposition dumbs. Even when Paul Walter Hauser jumps into the story to explain the entire plot, it feels appropriate and well executed after everything that the audience has experienced. He gives enough bridge to understand the core concepts of this universe without feeling overbearing.

This is certainly in line with Creggor’s previous work. Weapons was also a horror movie that thrived off of the strengths of its remarkable character studies and intelligent story construction. Resident Evil is certainly scaled back in ambition by those impressive standards, but this is also a blockbuster with broader goals. It wants to be an entertaining movie, and in this it succeeds beautifully in making its mark on a year that’s already had some heavy hitting blockbusters!