It’s a good time to look at video game movies as a whole – and as Daniel Rutledge reports, they’re mostly just bummers. Fortunately, a few push into the so-bad-they’re-good category and become more entertaining as they age.
I’ve blabbed on more than enough about how great HBO’s The Last of Us is on this website and anywhere else I can. All I’ll rehash on that here is that that TV show was amazing for many reasons, but it was miraculously good for a video game adaptation. Calling it “the best video game adaptation ever” is underselling it. Now fellow PlayStation property Gran Turismo is upon us in big screen form in the same year as Nintendo’s latest Super Mario Bros. adaptation is one of the top-grossing global releases, so it’s a good time to look at video game movies as a whole.
And the sad, undeniable fact is this: Films adapted from video games are shit with a depressingly reliable consistency. It’s shocking to me that films adapted from toys made for children in order to sell more of those toys have a better track record than films adapted from video games, but that is the reality of this mad world we live in.
Gamers have a well-deserved reputation as being an overly negative, juvenile bunch of people thanks to how a great many of them behave as mobs online, but I’d like to think I’ve always had an open mind going into these movies and would love to have loved them. Alas, they’re pretty much all shit, even the ones people including me thought weren’t so bad when they came out.
Yeah, Dwayne Johnson can be charming, but Rampage was extremely average, to put it charitably. Aaron Paul presumably came out of Breaking Bad with unlimited options and somehow he ended up doing that Need for Speed movie that had, er… look I’m sorry I can’t remember a single thing about that nothing-burger movie.
And it’s not the format that made The Last of Us work, by the way. Peter Jackson was doing a Halo movie for a while, then he wasn’t, then that project eventually emerged from development hell as a bland, totally forgettable TV show. I’ve seen one single scene from that new Twisted Metal show—it was about a minute long and it was a regrettable way to spend that minute.
Some video game movies have one cool scene in them and that can be enough to triumphantly take up an ‘oh that one was alright’ place in people’s minds—think the first-person sequence in Doom or the laser butchery bit in Resident Evil. Nope. Those are not good movies and rewatching them now is a foolish thing to do, even if you do remember really liking that one scene 20 years ago. Instead, watch those scenes isolated on YouTube now and spare yourself the precious time of watching the whole shitty movies they come from—time you could spend on watching stuff in your watchlist you actually should watch instead.
Then there are the modern ones that studios have seemingly given a decent chance, with decent budgets and decent crew and casts, but they still just manage to be meh-fests. Y’know, Warcraft, Uncharted, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the more recent Tomb Raider movie—they were all vaguely passable in the moment, but are pretty much the shittiest film on the resume of any of the solid talent involved.
Heck, the guy who made impressive festival/arthouse pics Snowtown, Nitram and True History of the Kelly Gang did a video game movie—that starred Michael Fassbender—and still managed to churn out an entirely disposable piece of mediocrity.
But there are different types of shit movies. Those mentioned above are mostly just bummers that make for a punishing rewatch. Other video game movies push into the so-bad-they’re-good category and become more entertaining as they age. Here’s a look at five of the most notable ones.
Top five best worst video game movies:
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li
This would be just another totally forgettable shit movie apart from one incredible element: Chris Klein. Most famous as the pretty boy in American Pie, in this movie he was hilariously miscast as a tough guy, with truly insane results.
Everyone’s dialogue is nonsensical garbage but when Klein emotes as hard as he can while intensely explaining that M Bison is so elusive he “walks through the raindrops”, that’s when this film became transcendent.
Double Dragon
Shortly after this starts, one of the main characters exclaims: “Eat some fist, butt heads!”. Not long thereafter, a bad guy refers to the main characters as “butt heads”. At other points, people get called “butt heads”. I find that lovely.
Made in the mid-90s and set in the post-apocalyptic Los Angeles of 2007, there’s a lot to laugh at in this shitty video game movie, from the blatantly obvious matte paintings to the wooden acting and ’90s computer graphics, to Robert Patrick channelling Vanilla Ice as the villain. But mostly it’s the very odd kids movie vibe they’re going for that constantly feels just so weird, but also really sweet. It’s a fun movie to revisit now, whether or not you’re a butt head.
Max Payne
Of all the video game movies I ever saw in cinema, this is the one that pissed me off the most, in a Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen kind of way. As a masochist I came back to it a decade or so later and amongst the excrement that this mostly is I found the extreme silliness a bit of a laugh.
Why get out of a car in the pouring rain to have a conversation right beside it in the pouring rain? Why did the tattoo artist just happen to have the exact correct literature on his desk at the exact right time? Why does the whole thing have some of the most dogshit colour grading and VFX of the 2000s, a decade chock full of ugly colour grading and grotty VFX? Such things may amuse, but don’t watch when grumpy.
Mortal Kombat – Annihilation
If you want the most hilariously bad special effects in any video game movie, this is the one to watch. The visual effects are absolutely shockingly shit, but everything else is too. The costumes are shitter than what you’d get from a Look Smart store, there are foam boulders and foam warhammers that are extremely blatantly obvious, the production design budget appears to have been lower than that of a primary school social, the fight choreography is rubbish.
It’s nice they cram so many characters from the games into this crap and nicer that every single one is played terribly. Brian Thompson takes the cake as Shao Kahn though, his performance is next level appalling in a really delightful way. It all adds up to a real best worst classic not just for video game movies, but for the entire film medium.
Alone in the Dark
This is generally regarded as the worst of the worst, the shittiest shit video game movie of them all. Made by the sentient haemorrhoid named Uwe Boll, it’s genuinely unbelievable how awful it is, but very quickly after it’s stupidly long opening crawl it moves into enjoyable shit territory.
I love that they use terrible VFX to put a blood pool under a dead guy rather than a practical effect. I love that a character who is dead starts getting up off the floor before the shot cuts away. Those are two of my favourite little details, but the relentless onslaught of baffling decisions, the way this is constantly unthinkably nonsensical; it’s fully deserving of its notoriety. Holy shit this shit is bullshit!
