For decades, Hollywood has tried to crack the code to a good Resident Evil movie. When Constantin Films bought the rights to the video-game franchise in 1997, it seemed like an easy win. The Resident Evil games started off as a play on George Romero’s zombie films but with puzzles and action-oriented combat sprinkled between the horror. It shouldn’t be that hard to reverse-engineer them into a movie franchise like the ones that originally inspired game developer Capcom. Turns out, it was. The Milla Jovovich-led films that were released from 2002-16 were box-office successes but only became more critically reviled by critics and fans alike as the franchise shuffled onward. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021) traded the post-Matrix aesthetic of director Paul W.S. Anderson’s franchise for a more accurate depiction of the games, only to deliver a middling,