Medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams) should be at the end of his shift and heading home. That is until he is asked to take a Category A package to the snow-covered mountainside town of Raccoon City. Events quickly get out of hand as he encounters mutated humans hungry for flesh.

In a fairly tight ninety minutes, we follow Bryan as he makes his way towards his destination and encounters many deadly monsters along the way.

Resident Evil is one of the most popular game franchises ever created. Beginning in 1996, it has spawned over thirty video games, numerous books, comics, animated movies and live-action films. This is the eighth live-action movie and the second full reboot of the series. This time they have hired up-and-coming horror director Zach Cregger, who made the rather good Barbarian and Weapons. However, Cregger’s goal here is not to repeat the story of any specific game, but rather to capture the essence of playing one.

The result is simultaneously successful, intriguing and likely to fail to impress either die-hard fans of the games or horror genre fans.

It succeeds in taking its audience on a journey from A to B, where you watch its protagonist overcome set pieces and improve along the way. We have first-person camera viewpoints, a protagonist who begins without a gun or any knowledge of how to use one and proceeds to obtain larger weapons along the way, and a series of different obstacles that get increasingly difficult. Cregger successfully builds tension in the set pieces, and Abrams imbues his protagonist with the sort of comic reactions to the absurd things happening to him that you might have whilst experiencing one of the games for the first time.

But Cregger’s usual clever storytelling and filmmaking tricks are constrained by the fact that he is adapting a videogame. Electing to give us a completely unknown protagonist only gives him so much freedom in the story he is telling and ultimately, as with the video games, this is not exactly deep as far as plot goes.

This is a film that you will enjoy the act of watching. It is brisk, comedic in the right places and offers lots of blood and tense moments. When it draws to a close, however, it just feels undercooked.

Video game fans are unlikely to be placated by some fun references to Bryan desperately searching drawers for shotgun shells when none of their beloved characters appear. And horror fans who have enjoyed Cregger’s previous two films might appreciate his artistic goal here, but will miss the verve and originality of those films.

Resident Evil is fine. But it is highly unlikely to generate the enthusiasm that its video game source material does.