Resident Evil review: Weapons director delivers the best video-game movie of all time

Running time: 95 minutes.Rated R (strong bloody violence, gore, and language throughout).

In theaters.It’s easy but dangerous to make a proclamation like “No more video-game movies!”.After the unbearable “Tomb Raider,” “Mortal Kombat,” “Borderlands,” the high-grossing “A Minecraft Movie,” the incomprehensible “Super Mario Bros.” and seven mostly atrocious “Resident Evil” trudges, stopping the trend seemed to be the only responsible course of action to spare Earth’s population any more torment.But, I’ll be damned, leave it to “Weapons” director Zach Cregger to finally deliver a great one — the new and improved “Resident Evil.”Not that the effort’s been painless.For the past few months, rabid fans of the video games have whined that Cregger — who is much smarter than they are — has brazenly departed from the original Playstation property.How dare he! There’s a fresh new lead, Bryan (Austin Abrams), instead of the tired old warhorses, Leon and Claire.The plot is parallel to the “Resident Evil 2′ game, but not identical.

Lock him up! These manchildren are very annoying and very wrong.Cregger takes what’s winning about the franchise — its tentacled mutant zombies, the Raccoon City setting, its breakneck mission — and injects the story with appealing weirdness and humor.He makes it an actual movie, God forbid.

That’s no simple task.Remember those ashen Milla Jovovich turds from the aughts? They were like going to a Berlin dungeon club at 4 a.m., and being shouted at by a dominatrix named Inga.

The Rammstein of action-horror films.The latest is a sprint, literally and cinematically.Bryan is a courier who will often bring organs for transplant to hospitals.

On the night the apocalyptic virus is unleashed on the mid-size metropolis, he has to rush an important package to Raccoon City General.Only pesky zombies keep getting in the way.Abrams also played the tent-dwelling drug dealer in “Weapons,” and in...