The greatest pleasure of the many pleasures found in Zach Cregger’s 2026 reboot of Resident Evil is the hilarious and mundane running commentary of millennial medical courier, Bryan played with absolute gusto by Austin Adams as if he is only one step ahead of losing himself to hysteria as he navigates his ever more terrifying and preposterous travails.
His expletive-laden stream of consciousness (there’s a fuck or motherfucking fuck every other word) is a constant source of amusement, at once hitching our wagon to his star whilst acting as a great reminder for all the dumb shit we say when playing video games for the first time.
The way we fumble our way through controls and unfamiliar gameplay until we become masters of our own destiny, chambering rounds like Delta Force soldiers and navigating the dark recess of our souls with the mastery of HP Lovecraft writing after midnight.
Bryan is super polite as he searches a busy hospital looking for the doctor who needs his package. We glimpse some bloody operations that hint at the glorious carnage to come, a peak into the adult world that Bryan is struggling with, an existential crisis looms large when he discovers his (offscreen) girlfriend, Michelle is pregnant. With America in financial meltdown, is it any wonder Bryan takes an extra courier job that pays double?
Cregger’s opening hit and run set piece, infuriatingly revealed in Resident Evil’s trailers as is the want of modern-day marketing, is thankfully not diminished as a spectacle and is masterfully shot. Bryan’s car skids to halt after hitting a mysterious woman in the snow and trudges to find her bathed in the insidious incarnadine of his taillights.
The red is monstrous to the point of absurdity, a grandiose gesture warning us of Cregger’s burgeoning talent and then at once subtly diluted when Bryan uses his phone light to look at where he hit the woman, faint flecks of red light left kissing the snow.
The music, like most music in these movies, is a thunderous, mutational, ode to John Carepenter’s electronic scores of his 1980s imperial phase. The ominous sonic portent is ludicrous enough to crush your bones to atoms as you sit in your cinema chair.
When the film title invades the screen some way into the movie, de rigueur in some fashionable film circles, it is hammered home with an aural brutality befitting Resident Evil’s cult credentials.
Resident Evil is continually propulsive, Bryan must solve one chilling conundrum after another, and he does so with a tortured levity. How does he find the safety on an automatic pistol, how does he escape a savage dog, where would a farmer keep their shotgun shells?
The ominous sonic portent is ludicrous enough to crush your bones to atoms as you sit in your cinema chair
Cregger punctuates these sequences with mundane sounds that increase the tension tenfold, a phone ringing followed by a protracted answerphone message is a stark counterpoint when two dead bodies merge their tentacles and become a twisted cousin to John Carpenter’s The Thing, you can practically hear the ghost of Palmer on Bryan’s face saying, ‘You gotta be fucking kidding!”
As Bryan progresses through his snowscape odyssey the stripped-back aesthetic of the opening becomes increasingly more bizarre and gonzo as if Bryan is improving at a real-life video game, evolving into a competent player who likes blowing away tentacled monstrosities with a double-barrelled shotgun, or hosing Hieronymus Bosch nightmares with his machine gun, with more than a touch of Ash from Evil Dead 2 in his violent exuberance and growing over confidence, with a dash of Die Hard and Hard Boiled thrown in for good measure.
Perhaps it’s fitting that the Resident Evil reboot is released just before the midterms as America comprehends the vile depravity unleashed on it during Trump’s second term, the Faustian pact the American voters made coming home to roost in a torrent of diarrhoea, measles, and vaccine distrust.
There is one monster, fat and bloated, spewing forth a deluge of acidic bile from a position of advantage that could be the bastard love child of Trump and RFK Jnr, forever tainted by the greed and lust of trillion-dollar corporations.
It’s hideous beyond belief. But if the so called snowflakes like Bryan can weather the shit show raining down from the rooftops then we might just exorcise the demons plaguing America and complete the boss level by slaying Trump and his MAGA lickspittles.
If you enjoyed this, see also Natalia Antonova’s review of this film