Quick Synopsis: An everyday medical courier named Bryan must transport a crucial package containing a missing cure ingredient into a chaotic, zombie-infested Raccoon City

I was a Nintendo kid growing up, and stayed that way until the Wii, when I decided my lack of coordination probably wasn’t going to work with the core of what that system was offering. So I switched to Xbox. I’ve just never really vibed with PlayStation, possibly because the kids who played it when I was growing up were the “I’m so cool, I’ll beat the shit out of you if you look at me weird” dickheads who I didn’t get on with. You know the type. The kind who would eventually move on to playing Call of Duty.

As such, Resident Evil isn’t a big part of my gaming life. Yes, it eventually moved onto other consoles, but it became a major gaming franchise on a system I’d never touched. I’m aware of the series and some of its lore, mainly thanks to the Kill Count by Zoran “I Can’t Think Of A Funny Nickname Like He Does And It Would Be An Insult To Try” Gvojic. I’ve seen one or two of the films, although the only thing I can remember is wondering why one of them used its final line – which was supposed to be a big twist – as the tagline. Oh, and I have the soundtrack to Extinction for some reason.

What I’m trying to say is that I’m not approaching this as a video game adaptation. I don’t know enough about Resident Evil to tell you whether it’s faithful to the games, and I’m not going into it like a cast member of The Traitors, desperately looking for clues about how faithful everything is. I’m just judging it as a film.

So, how does it work as a film? It’s pretty good. It’s not my favourite horror movie of the year, but I’m aware that a lot of the things I didn’t like about it are probably the exact things other people will like about it. For one thing, characters appear and disappear without much reason or rhyme. Maxine (played by Kali Reis) is a good example. She’s introduced as confident, badass, and very good at her job, which makes her feel like someone the film is setting up to stick around. She feels like a character being saved for an extended role in a sequel. So when she’s killed a few minutes after we’ve seen her effortlessly be awesome, it feels less shocking than it does cheap. The film spends time convincing us that Maxine is going to matter, only to immediately take her away.

The tonal whiplash was also jarring for me. Some characters just don’t seem to be taking the threat seriously, particularly the scientists in the closing level, who joke around as if they aren’t currently in the middle of the end of civilisation. You might have noticed I used the word “level” rather than scene. That’s not me being stupid (for once); that’s genuinely how it feels. The film plays like we’re moving through levels rather than following a conventional script. And that’s not entirely a bad thing. Moving between locations and characters gives the film opportunities to do things that wouldn’t work elsewhere, and it makes good use of them. The moment when the infected jump from the rooftops, splattering onto the street as Bryan runs towards the hospital, is something that can only happen in that location. Likewise, the acid-filled hospital lift works because it’s part of that particular sequence. The film’s game-like structure can make it feel disjointed, but it also gives it an excuse to keep throwing completely different situations at us.

The scares in the hospital were the highlights for me. The harsh lighting certainly helps, and hospitals are creepy enough without an army of infected people running around them. But Resident Evil doesn’t just rely on the obvious advantages of the setting; it comes up with some genuinely inventive scares of its own. The maternity ward scene, in particular, is sure to become the stuff of legend.

Conversely, the farmhouse wasn’t nearly as effective for me. Mainly because it’s one of the few sections where the film seems to lose its own identity. A lot of the moments there could have been lifted from almost any other horror movie. That’s what makes it stand out: for long stretches, Resident Evil knows exactly what it is and has a distinctive visual and tonal identity. So when it suddenly starts feeling like a generic horror film, you notice it. The problem isn’t that the farmhouse is less scary; it’s that it feels like Resident Evil has temporarily stopped being Resident Evil.

Performances? Austin Abrams does fine. Actually, he does more than fine. But every time I try to remember him, my brain immediately replaces him with Franz Kranz’s performance in The Cabin in the Woods. Nobody else is around for long enough to make much of an impression, so this is very much Abrams’ movie. He’s good in it, but it’s not the sort of performance that’s going to linger with me.

His character, however, has considerably more depth than I’d expect from a film like this. I haven’t seen a video game adaptation with this much character development since To Kill a Mockingbird (which everybody knows was an adaptation of Duck Hunt). Bryan’s entire character is built around avoiding parenthood and responsibility. So when he finds a young girl in danger, you’d expect the rest of the film to be him escorting her to safety like Pedro Pascal. Nope. She dies.

But that doesn’t make the relationship pointless. Her death is actually what makes his arc work. Bryan spends the film trying to avoid responsibility, and eventually he’s forced to step up and do what needs to be done. He doesn’t suddenly become a different person; he’s finally forced to become the person he’s been avoiding being.

In summary, I can’t tell you whether this is a good Resident Evil adaptation. I’m guessing not, but that’s not really my area of expertise. What I can say is that it feels like a video game movie. The characters, the visuals, the way the story is structured, even the fact that the hero is given the most important job in human history and then apparently nobody thinks to give him any help, so he has to do it all himself. It’s basically the video game experience distilled into a film.

Most importantly, it’s fun. It’s the kind of film that makes you want to watch it again, partly because you want to see what comes next and partly because you just want to experience the madness of it all again. And there aren’t many video game movies you can say that about.