Overall Rating
 Awesome: 3.7%
Worth A Look: 7.41%
Average: 14.07%
Pretty Bad: 35.56%
Total Crap: 39.26%
11 reviews, 69 user ratings
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| Doom |
by Scott Weinberg
"'Dumb' I can handle with no problem. 'Boring' is another story."
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I went into the latest video-game-movie experience dead-set against knocking the flick for its derivative plot, moronic characters, simplistic structure, and insipid screenplay. I was fully prepared to sit back, relax, and enjoy a good mindless piece of action-packed junk-food. But never in my pre-movie checklist did I ever consider that the thing would be so amazingly BORING.Based upon the amazingly popular series of PC games called, well, "DOOM," this grotesquely familiar and painfully sweaty yawnfest just plops right off the "synergy" assembly-line and into the laps of a thousand skeptical video game fans. "Will this movie be able to recapture some of the mood, the tone, the gruesome style of the video games?" they may be asking. And, since most video game players are also of above-average intelligence, their next logical question will be "Does it really matter?"
No, movie fans, it does not matter, because Doom could be based on a video game, a comic book, a toy, a boat, a shoe, or a Whitney Houston song. Source material being "source" and all that jazz, the video game adapters aren't really interested in much more than a familiar title, weapon, and poster font with which to sell their movie tickets.
Plus, c'mon. You could name this thing Alien Megaslaughter and it wouldn't change the fact that you're watching the 187th retread of Aliens that's as clueless about what made Aliens so great as it is ravenously intent on ripping off every single juicy morsel found within Cameron's classic.
Here's the pitch: A group of ultra-tough soldier dudes are sent to a Mars space station to look into a sudden emergency. Suffice to say that the whole place is crawling with aliens that might actually be mutated humans and/or zombified humans that might actually be mutated aliens. It's all very confusing, and I assume this is why most video games come with instruction booklets.
In lieu of an instruction booklet, Doom has an amazingly sketchy screenplay by David Callaham (first-timer, so he gets a break) and Wesley Strick (longtime veteran scribe, so he should know better) and the indecipherably bland direction of former cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak. (And here's a worthy question: Is it better to be the director of Doom, Cradle 2 the Grave, and Exit Wounds, or the cinematographer of The Devil's Advocate, Speed, and Terms of Endearment?)
Putting aside that the monsters are dull, the soldier dudes duller still, and that an omnipresent subplot about 'genetics this and mutation that' manages to bring the misshapen flick to a halt with no warning and even less effort... No, the biggest and most unforgivable shortcoming that Doom displays is its complete and utter ... boringness.
As in: The first hour of this movie consists of grunting men who wander down hallways while carrying flashlights, caressing weapons, and using the word "fuck" like they just invented the thing. Someone needed to take the director aside and say "Look, Andzy, when we say 'action scenes' we don't just mean aimless wandering and a random kill scene every 12.2 minutes." Doom was about three-quarters finished when a fellow critic looked over and whispered "I thought this was an action movie!"
The only members of the cast you'll recognize are: The Rock, who (for some stupid reason) decides to drop the "likable" section of his action-hero persona, and sinks his teeth into playing "Sarge" with all the one-note gruffness of an R. Lee Ermey caricature. Karl Urban plays a guy who just might turn out to be the flick's hero, but the guy's so damn glum and mumbly, you just won't care. And then there's lovely blonde Rosamund Pike as a archaeologist / researcher / exposition machine who simply never once shuts the hell up. The rest of the characters are one-note at best, garishly stupid at worst. Dexter Fletcher gets some cheap-shot comic relief as a half-man / half spacebike. (Don't even ask.)
Some will be content to call Doom the best video game to movie adaptation that we've received thus far. But what those people are saying is that Doom is better than Double Dragon, Super Mario Bros., House of the Dead, Resident Evil, and Alone in the Dark. In the appropriate context, it's not much of a compliment at all, now is it?The disappointment I feel regarding "Doom" does not stem from high expectations or from shoddy formula filmmaking. It comes from the fact that this flick promised me a ton of kickass action, and it failed to deliver. You'll feel like you ordered a steak and got a meatball.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=13269&reviewer=128
originally posted: 10/21/05 16:42:28
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USA
21-Oct-2005 (R)
DVD: 07-Feb-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
27-Oct-2005
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