Wet socks and scattered bullets – why the hero of the new Resident Evil adaptation is more honest than Leon

Anyone who has ever played through Resident Evil secretly believes they'd handle a zombie outbreak just as well as Leon Kennedy. Cool-headed reloads, headshots, a snappy one-liner at the end.

In reality, most of us would be standing in the middle of a snowy road screaming at a corpse for ruining our last pair of dry socks.

That's exactly the kind of hero Zach Cregger, director of Barbarian and Weapons, put on screen in his take on the iconic franchise. Bryan, played by Austin Abrams, works as an ordinary courier and knows how to shoot only from video games.

Cregger previously mentioned that he imagined the events of Resident Evil 2 unfolding alongside his movie storyline. Many jumped to interpret that as a canon claim, though he was really just talking about the story existing in parallel with the games.

Bryan main strength is that he keeps messing up, exactly the way a panicked person actually would.

He shoves a fistful of shells into a shotgun all at once, drops nearly every shell he finds while running from a pursuer, and genuinely can't figure out who shot his own car. Self-defense instructors have long known that fine motor skills are the first thing to go under extreme stress.

Even in training drills with simunition rounds, people sweat and shake despite knowing full well the weapon isn't real, because the key survival skill here isn't marksmanship, it's stress tolerance.

The cherry on top is a moment where a complete amateur nails an "HK slap" on an MP5 charging handle. The gesture is familiar to everyone from movies and games, but subtler details like keeping the trigger pinned while closing the bolt never show up in those depictions.

The ruined-shoes joke split viewers: some found it out of place, others immediately recalled how dangerous wet feet are in freezing weather. At twenty below, frostbite can set in within 5-10 minutes. Trench foot is still a real thing too, and it leaves limbs looking not much better than the corpses chasing the hero.

Comments predictably brought up Jack London's short story "To Build a Fire" and John McClane running barefoot over broken glass in Die Hard. But if even McClane had it rough, courier Bryan never stood a chance to begin with.

This kind of hero is actually closer to the franchise roots than it seems. Chris Redfield was practically a drifter in the first game before Barry recruited him into S.T.A.R.S., and Leon straight up slept through his first day on the job. Fans pointed out that, according to the original RE2 instruction booklet, he got drunk in a motel room after breaking up with his girlfriend.

Bryan has shades of a Silent Hill protagonist too, an ordinary guy carrying guilt toward his wife while clumsily waving a gun around.