Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A
Special Effects: B-

I might as well start off by saying that I am not the target audience for Resident Evil, per se. If this kind of movie is very much your jam, you will likely love it, and take anything I have to say about it from here on out with a grain of salt. Maybe don’t even keep reading. Go read something else! All the issues I have with this movie are my issues alone, and I am going to work through them now.

Now you are perhaps thinking I must have hated this movie, and I did not—far from it. There’s actually a great deal about it that I liked a lot. My major problem is that I fell prey to the hype—a rookie mistake that I keep making—and went in expecting this movie to be something it clearly is not. I thought I was going to experience something thrilling and exhilarating, and instead found myself sitting through a movie that is merely amusingly scary. Thanks to too many people I listened to talking about it, I expected Resident Evil to be both much funnier than it actually is, and far more action packed than it actually is. It spends much more time building tension, and when considering the creature effects, to me it occasionally came across like a cross between Alien (which gets very directly referenced, with bodily fluid burning through floors like acid) and Beetlejuice.

The genre lovers out there are raving about this Resident Evil—a kind of franchise reboot that, it turns out, is actually the eighth adaptation of the popular video game series that dates back a solid thirty years—and I kind of get it. I, on the other hand, am a film lover first, and while this Resident Evil is undeniably entertaining, it feels like at least a minor step down from director and co-writer Zach Cregger’s first two films, Barbarian and Weapons. Both of those films featured genuine innovations of the narrative form of cinema. Resident Evil certainly features fun tweaks to video-game-to-film adaptation conventions, but here is where I would argue “innovation” is a rather strong word.

When it all comes down to it, Resident Evil is just another zombie movie. Okay, so the zombies here have tentacles, and have a few other tricks up their sleeves. There are certain shots where creature design looks like the demogorgon from Stranger Things (itself a retro sensation without any original ideas) by way of Little Shop of Horrors. I realize most of the audience seeing Resident Evil will be far too young to even get that last reference. This Resident Evil has been characterized as “breaking all the rules,” and yet I can think of better movies that also broke the same rules.

But, again, if you love zombies, then this is a movie for you. To be fair, this film is still far better than most of the other zombie movies, and certainly horror movies, that have ever been made. Of course, given the genre we’re talking about here, it would not be inappropriate to say that the bar is in hell. Zach Cregger doesn’t have to do that much to be relatively impressive.

So here are the ways Resident Evil did impress me. After so many pointlessly over-indulgent movies racking up runtimes of increasingly more than two and a half hours, this one clocking in at 95 minutes—which means less than 90 minutes at the point the credits roll—is a genuine dream. I’ll give the movie this much: there is not a second wasted in it. Thrilling or not, it’s never boring, and it plays like The Odyssey if all the traveling vignettes were grotesque monsters that existed for their own sake.

And Austin Abrams, who also had a key supporting part in Weapons (the very distinct difference between the two showcasing his versatility of talent), deserves special mention. He is Bryan, the young man whose point of view we follow from the beginning until the end. He’s couriering a package, which he assumes to be an organ, to Raccoon City General Hospital, and you’ve got to hand it to him—the guy never loses that package. Abrams plays a guy with a grunt job running an extra errand for double pay very well, and his ineptitude with guns in real life is well observed. He even talks about how he only shoots guns in video games, one of the few references to gaming in the film that I actually clocked, out of presumably a bunch.

I wish I could say the same for the rest of the cast, except that it features fun casting in bit parts by players who are ultimately wasted in far too little screen time: Paul Walter Hauser; Griffin Newman; Severance’s Jack Cherry; True Detective: Night Country’s Kali Reis. Hauser in particular is saddled with some of the film’s clunkiest dialogue.

I do wish more horror movies would dispense with the backstories ostensibly added to give the characters more depth. People come to these movies to see horror and mayhem, not an examination of the characters’ psychological damage. This is often a fatal flaw, as in They Will Kill You from earlier this year: every time the movie returns to the sisters’ damaged past, the movie grinds to a halt. Mercifully, we get none of that shit in Resident Evil. We do get a minor backstory involving potentially life-altering news from Ryan’s girlfriend (who we only ever hear as a voice on the phone), but only in two brief scenes, and in the end it largely only builds up to one of the movie’s better punchlines.

In other words, there’s a lot for even me to enjoy in Resident Evil. It just doesn’t stack up to Cregger’s previous work. He was very open about wanting to pivot with this film and just do something super fun, and he clearly had fun making it. And I’m glad! I’m just not willing to go so far as to consider this movie anything special.

*Something about that woman doesn’t feel right.*

Overall: B