We're all doomed

Monster mash: Doom

10 April 2012

As the father of a 14-year-old boy, I've seen a lot of shoot-em-up games, and even tried a few. So please don't think I'm prejudiced against filmmakers turning video games into movies.

Lord Of The Rings director Peter Jackson has signed up to make one, Halo, so perhaps some day there'll be a good example.

But the lengthening list of rotten films made out of video games - including the Lara Croft, Resident Evil, Super Mario and Final Fantasy movies - is far from encouraging.

And while Doom is too glossy and slick to rank as a turkey, it must be one of the biggest wastes of time, money and celluloid ever perpetrated in the name of mindless entertainment.

The most horrific thing in this deliberately nasty horror flick is the lack of originality.

Remember the premise behind Aliens, where a small group of marines go to a space station to find out what has been destroying its inhabitants? Doom's borrowed that.

Remember Stargate's portal to another planet and the climactic confrontation between the leader of a military expedition (Kurt Russell) and one of his subordinates (James Spader) about whether to blow up all the inhabitants or not? That's been pinched as well.

And the look of the humans infected by the aliens with a zombie virus, not to mention their antisocial behaviour and the fact that it's all the result of a big-business genetic experiment gone wrong, is a rip-off of Resident Evil.

There are no nasty surprises, unless you count the news that Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, who has been showing signs of acting promise, here reverts to a monumental lumpishness that may make you nostalgic for the subtle facial stylings of Steven Seagal.

A couple of previously reputable thesps, Karl Urban (Eomer in Lord Of The Rings) and Rosamund Pike (Jane in Pride And Prejudice), are wasted as horribly humourless and unlikely twins.

The beautiful Ms Pike - cast, of course, as a brilliant biologist - keeps having to spout meaningless and erroneous jargon that's meant to tell us the scientific basis for what's happening, as if the kind of people who will attend this movie will comprehend or care.

Two writers have bravely taken responsibility for the cliche-ridden screenplay.

One is David Callaham, making his first and possibly last picture. According to the production notes, his favourite pastime is 'playbymail imaginary professional wrestling', which says it all, really.

The other writer is veteran Wesley Strick, whose less embarrassing credits include Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear. Among the credits he doesn't talk about in the production notes are the Richard Gere stinker Final Analysis and the ghastly The Glass House, which made a laughing stock out of the estimable Stellan Skarsgard and Diane Lane. Doom belongs very definitely to the second, inferior category.

The whole film is one long, feeble excuse for acts of carnage, a lot of shooting, a spot of fighting, followed by big things blowing up. To get to all this, you have to survive half an hour of tedious exposition, so there's a better than even chance you'll be fast asleep before anything remotely exciting happens.

At one point, director Andrzej Bartkowiak acknowledges the roots of the movie by switching to a firstperson point-of-view of a soldier running through corridors and shooting fake, computer-generated monsters that jump out at him.

This serves only to emphasise that sitting through this film is even less fun than watching a sad adolescent play a video game.

Personally, I'd put the experience on a par with sitting down in a dark sewer and waiting to be eaten alive by rats.

Doom
Cert: cert15

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