#OLD TIMEY 3... 2... 1... VIDEO MOVIE#

It tried so hard and wanted so badly to make us happy, but despite all the time and all that money and the best efforts of director Duncan Jones, the final product was a whole lot of “meh” with great visual effects. “Need for speed”: It’s not just a title, it’s also a worthwhile video-game-movie runtime guide.

#OLD TIMEY 3... 2... 1... VIDEO MOVIE#

Really, any movie exceeding 100 minutes in this genre is just plain rude. At more than two hours long, Speed becomes an unnecessary endurance test, with a lot of time wasted not showing the best people in it. Boll, who’s at least good at injecting levity into his movies, struggled to find the humor in this rough outing.ĭespite the fact that the cast of the Aaron Paul–fronted Need for Speed includes Imogen Poots, Rami Malek, Dominic Cooper, and even Michael Keaton in an admirably amped up turn as an omniscient, eccentric rich guy who just wants to see people street race exotic cars, it manages to be way too boring. Robot resurgence and Tara Reid as an anthropologist and assistant museum curator. It’s got Christian Slater ten years before his Mr. This is the fifth of six movies on our list directed by Uwe Boll (more to come!), and he really outdid himself with the casting for Alone in the Dark. Director Justin Kurzel made strange magic with Cotillard and Fassbender in last year’s Macbeth, and they should have just left it at that. How do you waste the talents of Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard this thoroughly? Not to mention Charlotte Rampling, Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleeson, and Michael K. The year that video-game movies tried to do way too much in a genre that just shouldn’t be relied upon to provide a Good Movie. Casting these three men as Persians automatically starts Sands of Time well behind the pack, and not even the ridiculousness of watching Gyllenhaal try to save the world with a dagger that alters time can help the movie make up for lost ground.Īh, 2016. Additionally, Ben Kingsley and Alfred Molina played characters named Nizam and Sheik Amar, respectively. The titular prince, Dastan, was played by Jake Gyllenhaal. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) Uwe Boll, you make it so hard to love you.Ĥ2. Everything hovers around that level of bad and offensive for the rest of the movie, making this an easy call for definitively worst video-game adaptation ever. The argument ends with them deciding to fly to the Bahamas instead, but then the passengers of their hijacked plane revolt and force it to crash into the World Trade Center. Postal opens on two terrorists in the cockpit of a plane, fighting about how many virgins greet martyrs when they enter heaven.

Here it is, a movie that should make you think Warcraft is high art. Our regrets to any staunch defenders of those two titles. But briefly, an explanation: Entries had to be live action, meaning no Angry Birds, and while BloodRayne is on this list, BloodRayne: Deliverance and BloodRayne: The Third Reich had little to do with the source material, so they were left out of the rankings. So, here’s every video-game movie ranked according to its place in the video-game movie canon, starting with the most absolutely unwatchable and descending down to rare work of honest to god quality. Street Fighter is always going to suffer in comparison to, say, Die Hard, but if you consider it in the context of similar fare, things start to look a little more impressive.

It’s useless to judge video-game movies the way we judge other movies, so Vulture has decided to weigh them exclusively against their peers. Promising growth is happening in the game movie space, and for that we should rejoice!īut while the paradigm might be shifting ever so slightly, B-movie status is historically the ceiling on these kinds of products. Alicia Vikander’s Tomb Raider has garnered a respectable chorus of supporters in the years since its release, and 2021’s Werewolves Within turned out to be a straight up gem. It eked out a positive critical consensus and even reintroduced the singular physical comedy stylings of Jim Carrey after a long Serious Film hiatus. But things started to change with the arrival of Sega and Paramount’s lovable live-action Sonic the Hedgehog in 2020. In the three decades since the release of the first game-to-screen movie, 1993’s Super Mario Bros., there have been precious few good entries in the genre (in a critical sense). Something has happened in video-game adaptations over the past few years. This article was originally published in 2016 and has been updated to include recent releases, including this month’s Sonic 2. Photo-Illustration: Vulture/Photos by Universal Pictures, Capcom, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros, Midway, Buena Vista Pictures, Sony Pictures Releasing and Core Design

Old timey 3... 2... 1... video