From “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” to “Super Mario Bros.,” I’ve seen enough video game-to-movie conversions to know just how painful they can be to watch.
Now comes “Doom,” a new movie based on a game where the whole point is dishing out as much pain as possible to endless waves of monsters.
Let’s dispense with the obvious: In both the movie and the game, the stories are weak and character development just gets in the way of the carnage.
Though I squirmed more at the one-liner bombs dropped by Sarge (The Rock) than the buckets of spattered blood, I still have to give it some credit: the movie is nowhere near as bad as it could have been.
And if what I witnessed at a packed screening in Dallas is any indication, hardcore fans of the game will love it.
Casting The Rock was a good call, his ripped torso and steely eyes effectively conveying Sarge and his single-minded, kick-butt, kill-all mentality.
The story deviates ever-so-slightly, but not too much by Hollywood standards.
In the game, you play as a Marine on a Martian outpost that becomes a gateway to hell after a series of top secret experiments involving ancient alien artifacts. With shotguns, rocket launchers, lasers and grenades, you alone must fend off a menagerie of beasts and possessed base workers.
The big screen portrays the monsters and former base workers as bioengineered experiments gone awry instead of demons from hell merely doing what they do best.
In that regard, the movie skimped on the number and variety of beasties prowling around. Where were the real horrors like towering cyberdemons and flame-tossing imps?
There were plenty of regular guns in the movie, but the so-called BFG (the biggest and baddest of them all in the game) hardly gets used.
The movie is crammed with references which are sure to sail over the heads of non-gaming moviegoers like a frag grenade.
Dr. Carmack, one of the first of many scientists on the base to meet an untimely death, is a nod to John Carmack. He’s the real-life co-owner and technical director of the company that created the “Doom” game in the early 1990s, id Software Inc.
Another observation: the film’s weapons had lights. Ask anyone who’s played the recent “Doom 3,” and they’ll rant about how you can only wield a flashlight or a weapon during combat, but not both.
Gamers will get the biggest thrill from an extended sequence near the end when a hero nicknamed Reaper (Karl Urban) romps through the base first-person shooter style, tearing through the evil hordes with the same fury seen on the computer screen.
It ends with a blurry, bloody standoff involving a chain saw, a flashlight and one of the more pugnaciously memorable creatures from the game.
There were times, though, when I found myself wishing I could simply go home, fire up the computer game version and control my own destiny.
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