Zach Cregger's "Resident Evil" reboot turns an ill-advised night shift into a wild rollercoaster of action horror, according to a Guardian review published September 16.

The film's secret weapon is Austin Abrams, who plays Bryan, a courier the review calls a "glorified Postmates driver, in his own estimation." Horror fans, the critic notes, usually greet on-screen stupidity with vocal derision — "Don't go in there! Girl, get out of the house! Guys, ignore that distress signal!" — but they "may find themselves falling a little bit in love with Bryan."

The comparison the review draws is to Bruce Campbell. Bryan is not traditionally hunky, nor even a caricatured square-jawed warrior like Campbell in his later "Evil Dead" outings. Yet Abrams possesses "a Campbell-ish charm, even in the face of his character's repeated blundering," plus an everyman relatability that keeps this "wild carnival-ride movie" grounded.

The plot setup is economical. Bryan postpones the end of his shift to take one last night-time run: driving an important item from one hospital to another through a snowstorm — without proper tires or four-wheel drive. The distance and the urgency mean double pay. When he hits a mysterious woman who emerges suddenly onto a slick road, he is pulled into a hellish outbreak.

That outbreak will look familiar to fans of the "Resident Evil" video game series. It may also resonate with viewers of the previous six-film Milla Jovovich franchise, which, as the review dryly notes, "apparently drifted afield from the games' storylines."

Cregger, previously the director of "Weapons," delivers what the reviewer describes as a seat-edge thriller, with Abrams's lead performance singled out as the standout element. The director's approach trades traditional heroics for the comedy of a hapless ordinary man navigating escalating chaos.

The reboot arrives as Hollywood continues to mine Capcom's survival-horror property, and Cregger's version leans on character-driven charm — the Campbell lineage of likable incompetence — rather than the action-star model of the Jovovich era. For a franchise that has strayed before, betting on an everyman may be its surest route back to the games' spirit.