2012 has seen two of the worst video game to movie adaptations to date with Resident Evil: Retribution and Silent Hill: Revelation both jaw-droppingly awful. Despite having the scripts already pretty much written for them, and gigantic built-in audiences, Hollywood still hasn't managed to make a good movie out of a videogame. Judging by the Rotten Tomatoes scores, the best live action video game adaptation to date has been 2010's Prince Of Persia, and even then it's got a lowly score of 35%. How they've managed to completely screw the pooch with pretty much every outing so far isn't entirely clear; it might be because they've hired bad directors, or made the mistake of changing something about the game that was integral to it being awesome in the first place.
In the near future there is the possibility that we'll get our first good video game movie; Assassin's Creed set to star Michael Fassbender, Castle Wolfenstein to be brought to us by the guy who wrote Pulp Fiction and directed Rules Of Attraction, and Uncharted has some of the hottest cast and crew in Hollywood dying to make it. But until then, let's take a look back over the ten biggest mistakes Hollywood has made so far:
10. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
Despite the spot-on casting of Angelina Jolie in the title role, a director hot off the huge hit Con Air and a massive international fan-base, Tomb Raider still turned out to be a huge disappointment. A nonsense script, epilepsy inducing editing and replacing the T-Rex of the game with a giant robot didn't stop the movie from becoming a box-office hit, enough to green-light the much better, but still pretty bad sequel The Cradle Of Life. The video game is due a gritty reboot next year, so hopefully the movie series will get a make-over soon, too.
9. The Resident Evil Series
The video game series of Resident Evil is known for its share of scares and blood-letting, but unfortunately the movies series is better known for its share of painful storytelling and awful acting. While the first Resident Evil movie wasn't completely terrible, every movie since then has been on a sliding scale of crap, culminating with this year's Resident Evil: Retribution.
8. Doom
The video game plot of Doom was fairly basic; aliens appear on the one of the moons around Mars, and space soldiers have to shoot them with guns. This should have allowed the movie makers to create a more interesting story to tack the alien-shooting on to. Unfortunately the plot was exactly as basic, and despite an impressive cast including Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike and The Rock, it was still powerfully dull.
7. Mortal Kombat
This movie may have its cult following, and at times can be quite entertaining in spite of itself, but from a critically point of view, Mortal Kombat is a terrible movie. Directed by Paul WS Anderson (who is also responsible for three of the five Resident Evil movies), Mortal Kombat features a no-name cast, shoddy special effects and oddly bloodless fight scenes, considering its origins. It also has a sequel which was even worse, but thankfully very few people have seen.
6. Hitman
Once again, perfect casting (Timothy Olyphant) and some truly interesting source material (a genetically engineered assassin) couldn't stop this movie from being abhorrent. One or two well shot action sequences aside, this was a mostly dull “thriller” that not even the insanely hot Olga Kurylenko could save.
5. Max Payne
Irish director John Moore already had three awful movies on his CV (Behind Enemy Lines, Flight Of The Phoenix, The Omen) before he decided to turn his hand to video game adaptations. A crazy hot cast - Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Olga Kurylenko (again!) - and a great, old-school plot about a detective on the edge was entirely wasted in this completely incoherent movie. Next up on John Moore's slate? Die Hard 5.
4. Street Fighter
The video game was about a group of international, super-powered people who get involved in a world-wide fighting championship. The movie should have been X-Men meets The Game Of Death. Instead, the special powers were stripped away, and we got a movie about terrorists and a group of green berets played by Jean Claude Van Damme and Kylie Minogue. Could be considered a “so bad it's good” movie, depending on how drunk you are. Again, there's a sequel which is worse, but again, I doubt even the cast have watched it all the way through.
3. Silent Hill: Revelation
Yes, it's just that bad. The Silent Hill video games are some of the greatest ever made, and represent a strong case that video games should be considered a form of interactive art. The first Silent Hill movie was mostly bad, but at least had a general sense of creepiness about it. The sequel takes away even that, making it a laughably bad “horror” movie with one of the worst scripts ever committed to the big screen.
2. Super Mario Brothers
The first proper live action video game adaptation did not get the genre off to a good start, making less than half its budget back, and getting some of the worst reviews of all the movies released in 1993. How they managed to talk the Oscar-nominated likes of Bob Hoskins and Dennis Hopper into staring in this obvious absolute mess about plumbers looking to save a princess from a dragon is beyond comprehension.
1. Any Video Game Movie Directed By Uwe Boll
Let's take a look at the Rotten Tomatoes scores for all of the video game adaptations done by Uwe Boll: House Of The Dead - 4%, Alone In The Dark - 1%, Bloodrayne - 4%, Postal - 8%, Dungeon Siege - 4%, Far Cry - 24% (getting better!)… It's actually shocking how much damage one man has done to people taking video game movies seriously. What's even more shocking is that he keeps getting the funding and the rights to make these movies, as even his least critically savaged movie, Far Cry, cost $30 million to make, but made less than $1 million at the box office. Here's hoping Hollywood stops giving him permission to make his piles of crap, and finally start taking the multi-billion dollar industry seriously. Fingers crossed…