A courier heads to Racoon City to deliver a very important package and has to contend with unspeakable horrors. The film stars Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, and Paul Walter Houser. 

Resident Evil is an interesting movie. I have seen all of the Milla Jovovich movies as well as Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City. I know the Milla Jovovich movies have a mixed reception. A common complaint is it’s not the most faithful to the games. The franchise leans more into the action side than the horror side, especially as the movies progressed. Welcome to Racoon City had a little more horror but was also still fairly action packed to a degree. I liked the original movies, and I thought Welcome to Racoon City was decent. I liked the cast of that movie. The new one is more faithful to the tone of the games. It’s a more contained story. It does not have a large cast. It primarily just focuses on Austin Abrams who plays the courier in the film. He is trying to survive the night while making delivery to Racoon City. The movie has zombies and it is bloody. It is also a little more intimate. There are some emotional beats in this. 

I know of the games, but I never really played them. I played one years ago, and I did not like it. It was not my type of thing. I wasn’t a fan of the limitations the early games had. I like open worlds in the video games I play, and those games are much more constrained. The movie is similar in vibe and tone to the games. I think it was a good choice to have an original story set in this world instead of trying to adapt one from the games. The director Zach Cregger was free to do what he wanted in a world he wanted to play in. 

I thought Austin Abrams did a great job as Bryan the courier. I found him very relatable. He was an average guy thrown into a horror show. I felt he reacted the way a lot of people would, including myself in the situations he wound up in. 

One thing that I found surprising was the amount of humor that was in the movie. Going into the theater, I was expecting it to be a fairly straight through horror movie. I thought the humor in the movie worked. It didn’t feel forced. It felt natural and relatable. A lot of the humor stemmed from Bryan and the situations he was involved in. I thought what they did with Racoon City was interesting. It was a different presentation than what the other films did. I liked the choices made with this Racoon City. 

There are no credit scenes in this movie. This movie truly is a self-contained story. Given it is in the world of Resident Evil, I suppose anything is possible in terms of more stories to tell. I think that would come down to if the studio would want anymore and of course how this film does box office wise. 

Resident Evil is a solid and refreshing take on the franchise. It is intimate, gory, and surprisingly funny.