Resident Evil turns video game frustration into its best running joke

There are plenty of monsters in Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil. But perhaps no enemy proves more formidable than the humble padlock.

Early in the movie, Bryan (Austin Abrams) is trying to escape a farm when he reaches a gate secured with a massive padlock stamped with a Diamond emblem. He’s armed with a rifle, so the solution seems obvious enough: shoot the lock and move on. Except the bullets do nothing. So Bryan tries the next most logical solution and rams the gate with the farmer’s truck. The gate wins.

Adding insult to injury, the key he needed was nearby the whole time, under the sun visor. He just didn’t find it until after he’d totaled the truck.

It’s the beginning of one of Resident Evil‘s funniest running jokes. Bryan keeps encountering padlocks as he makes his way through the movie, becoming increasingly exasperated every time another one prevents him from getting where he needs to go. Eventually, he snaps: “What is with all the fuckin’ padlocks, man?”

Anyone who’s spent enough time playing Resident Evil already knows the answer. It doesn’t matter that you have a gun. It doesn’t matter that you’ve spent the last several hours blasting through amalgamation monsters. If the game wants you to find a key, you’re finding the damn key.

And Cregger knows exactly what he’s doing.

Resident Evil understands the absurdity of video game logic

Cregger has been explicit that his Resident Evil isn’t trying to recreate the plot of any particular game in Capcom’s horror franchise. Instead, he’s interested in recreating the experience of playing one. That means limited ammunition, healing items, increasingly powerful weapons, and, yes, repeatedly facing locked doors that prevent you from progressing until you find whatever key or keycard the game has decided you need.

“Some of them I wouldn’t even think of as Easter eggs,” Cregger told Steve Goldman of Rolling Stone when asked about the movie’s references to the games. He specifically pointed to “padlocks and the search for keys and keycards” as something that’s “really baked into playing the games,” alongside healing items, ammunition, and weapon progression.

“All of that is like the DNA of the games that is in the movie,” he said.

That’s an important distinction. Putting a green herb or typewriter somewhere in the background is an Easter egg. Making your protagonist desperately search for a key while standing in front of a lock he has already shot and unsuccessfully rammed with a truck is adapting a game mechanic. Because in a video game, that padlock isn’t really a padlock. It’s a progression system.

Locked doors have been fundamental to Resident Evil since the beginning. Exploring the franchise’s mansions, police stations, and villages frequently means discovering places you can’t access yet, hunting down keys and other items, solving puzzles, and eventually backtracking once you have what you need. Resident Evil 2, for example, scatters suit-themed keys throughout the Raccoon City Police Department, with different doors requiring the Spade, Diamond, Club, or Heart Key.

The lock tells the player, “You can’t go here yet.” The missing key gives them a reason to explore somewhere else. So finding it doesn’t just open a door; it opens another part of the game.

It makes perfect sense as game design. According to virtually every other form of logic, however, it is completely ridiculous. Your character can be carrying enough firepower to take down a mutated bioweapon, but a padlock might as well be indestructible. The player knows there’s an obvious solution. The game knows there’s an obvious solution. But that’s not the solution you’re supposed to use.

Cregger’s movie makes that implicit agreement between player and game explicit by giving us a character who doesn’t know the rules.

Bryan isn’t Leon S. Kennedy. He’s a medical courier who Cregger described to Rolling Stone as “more suited to sitting on the couch playing Resident Evil than surviving an actual Resident Evil experience.” So when Bryan encounters a locked gate, he reacts like someone in the real world rather than as a player who knows he’s in a survival horror game. He shoots it. When that doesn’t work, he drives a truck into it.

Neither works, because that’s not how Resident Evil works.

The padlock isn’t just an Easter egg. It’s gameplay.

In an interview with Dread Central, Cregger acknowledged that some of the games’ more elaborate puzzles wouldn’t necessarily translate to a movie he wanted to keep moving at a breakneck pace. Instead, the padlocks offered a shorthand.

Bryan “does come up against padlocks throughout the movie, and he’s got to try and navigate those,” Cregger said. “So I’m kind of like tipping my hat to those sorts of things.”

Resident Evil also finds other ways to recreate the rhythms of playing Resident Evil. During a Reddit AMA before the film’s release, Cregger talked about making ammunition matter as Bryan gradually acquires more powerful weapons. “I love the resource management aspect of the games, and it was really important to me to bring that to the movie,” he wrote.

That same attention to gameplay shows up everywhere, from healing items to cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s shifting camera perspectives. But the padlocks might be the funniest expression of it, precisely because they take something Resident Evil players have long accepted and make its absurdity impossible to ignore.

Cregger isn’t just showing fans something they remember from Resident Evil. He’s recreating the particular frustration of playing it.

In a 2025 Reddit thread about the series’ conveniently indestructible obstacles, one player recalled encountering a door they couldn’t open because its knob was broken. “Meanwhile, I have a shotgun and a grenade launcher in my arsenal,” they wrote. Another joked about the absurdity of firing endless rockets at a wooden door only to eventually accept, “Damn, guess I need to go around.”

A year earlier, another fan put the problem even more succinctly: “Half of Resident Evil would be skipped if everyone did a Barry and just shot the locks off the door.” That’s basically the joke Cregger has turned into a movie.

Video games depend on these little agreements between player and developer. A locked door isn’t always just a locked door. It’s an instruction, a puzzle. You don’t spend the entire game asking why your heavily armed protagonist can’t simply destroy it because you understand what it’s actually telling you: You’re not supposed to go there yet.

Put that logic into a live-action movie, though, and suddenly you have Bryan, a guy who looks at the arbitrary rules Resident Evil players have spent nearly 30 years accepting and asks the obvious question: Why can’t I just shoot the lock?

That’s the kind of thing video game adaptations don’t always capture. It’s easy enough to recreate the monsters, weapons, locations, and camera angles we recognize. It’s harder to recreate the feeling of playing the game — wasting a bullet you desperately needed, finding a better weapon at exactly the right moment, or discovering yet another locked door.

Cregger gets that those little frustrations are part of Resident Evil, too.

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