The new Resident Evil reboot ditches the old formula for a smaller, meaner bad day at work story, and critics are calling it exactly what the franchise needed

[TheGame]

The new Resident Evil film reboot, directed by Zach Cregger and released on September 18, has landed to largely positive reviews that praise the film for abandoning the franchise's familiar patterns entirely in favour of a smaller, more grounded horror story. The film follows Bryan, a stressed medical courier played by Austin Abrams, whose attempt at one final delivery along icy mountain roads spirals from a routine car accident into a catastrophic encounter with mutated creatures, eventually revealing the wider Umbrella Corporation bioweapon outbreak already consuming Raccoon City around him. The supporting cast includes Zach Cherry, Kali Reis and Paul Walter Hauser.

What critics are highlighting as the reboot's key strength is its willingness to reframe the entire premise as a bad day on the job for an ordinary blue collar protagonist, rather than either recreating specific video game set pieces or attempting the kind of broader social commentary some prior franchise entries leaned toward. The approach favours contained, intimate horror over sprawling spectacle, uses dark comedy to deliberately undercut familiar zombie movie tropes, and leans into single creature tension rather than the large scale horde sequences that defined much of the earlier film series.

The review describes the film as having enough fresh blood to keep the limbs twitching, praising Cregger's approach as winningly focused precisely because it stays funnier, meaner and, at its best moments, smaller than audiences might expect from this franchise. The verdict is not entirely without reservations, however, with the review noting the story loses some momentum and clarity once it expands outward into Raccoon City's larger, more spectacle driven set pieces later on.

Review: Resident Evil might just be the best gaming adaptation yetarstechnica.com