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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 Peter Sobczynski
"Where is Uwe Boll when you need him?"
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“Doom” may be the first movie in memory–certainly the first based on a videogame–that might have been improved if Uwe Boll has been at the helm. Like the good doctor’s previous films–“House of the Dead” and “Alone in the Dark”–it is simply terrible but unlike those other films, which at least had the wit to be bad in ways that few could have possibly conceived, “Doom” is more run-of-the-mill boring and derivative than anything else. Essentially, it is nothing more than a rehash of the “Resident Evil” movies–the only difference is that the lead here is played by someone with a significantly larger chest than Milla Jovovich.The bad news is that the pecs in question belong to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, here playing a tough-as-nails futuristic Marine sergeant creatively named Sarge. Sarge commands a platoon of similar cliches–the ranks also include a Brad Dourif-esque wacko, a wet-behind-the-ears newbie known as The Kid, a deeply religious wacko and a quiet guy with a traumatic past that will inevitably rear its ugly head–and as the film opens, their leave has just been cancelled by an emergency. Something hideous has found its way inside a giant research facility on Mars and the platoon is sent in to rescue the survivors, seal the area and retrieve the scientific data left behind. For the guy with the traumatic past, Reaper (Karl Urban), this is bad news because his parents were apparently killed on the planet years earlier (I say “apparently” because the traumatic aural flashback we are treated to is so confusing that it is difficult to say exactly what happened) and his estranged twin sister, Samantha (Rosamund Pike) is still working there.
Of course, this is all merely prelude because we know that once they land on Mars, they are going to come under constant assault from a variety of bizarre monsters that can only be dispatched in the goriest manner possible. Well, we know that but it seems as if the filmmakers didn’t get that memo because it takes forever for the action to finally kick in. There is a possibility, I suppose, that they are trying to replicate the feeling of the similarly plotted “Aliens” by winding up the tension for the first 45 minutes or so before turning into an all-out action extravaganza. The difference is that James Cameron spent that 45 minutes creating a group of characters that you actually grew interested in so that when things started blowing up, viewers had a vested interest in their survival. Here, writers Dave Callahan and Wesley Strick (and how hilarious is it that the film version of “Doom” required at least two writers?)seem content to let things plod along at an unforgivably slow pace as a bunch of relentlessly uninteresting characters poke around in shadowy corners delivering lines such as “Let’s se if we can find the body that goes with that arm.” If this actually were a video game, most people would click out and begin fiddling with their solitaire game.
Once the action finally commences, it is nothing that you haven’t seen before a thousand times before in a thousand better ways. Ugly, barely-glimpsed things jump out of the shadows with monotonous regularity and either tear someone to shreds or are torn themselves. The only time the film attempts to break out this pattern is towards the end when there is a stretch of five or so minutes in which we are treated to a first-person point-of-view shot of a character as he does gory battle with an onslaught of creatures in an apparent tribute to the visual approach of the original game, one of the first and best of the first-person shooter genre. The problem is that after the brief jolt inspired by the gimmick wears off–and it is the closest that the film gets to pure Boll weirdness–it just becomes as pointless and repetitive as the rest of the film. Watching this sequence contains all the raw, visceral excitement of looking over someone else’s shoulder while they are playing the game–fun if you are playing the game, less so if you are looking over the shoulder.
Having already demonstrated that he has the kind of charisma to make it as a movie star in films such as “The Rundown,” it is hard to understand why Johnson thought that appearing in “Doom” would be a good career move. Since neither the film nor the character he plays are remotely suited for showing off his two greatest assets as a performer–his considerable physique and willingness to poke fun at himself and his he-man image–he just stands around looking uncomfortable in the type of role that Dolph Lundgren might have been assigned if this film had been made fifteen years ago. The other bewildering presence in the film is that of Rosamund Pike and that comes more from the fact that I just saw her a couple of weeks ago in “Pride and Prejudice” and know that she actually can act. Although I can’t say that I was disappointed to see a pretty face amidst all the squalor, I just can’t quite understand why she is appearing in a piece of junk like this playing a character whose only functions seem to be screaming and suggesting to us in the audience that the lab thermostat must be set pretty low.As a game, “Doom” was a success because it took a simple and elemental premise (you are surrounded by demons and have to kill them before they kill you) and handled it with relentless energy and enthusiasm. The film, on the other hand, seems to have been based on the premise that anything bearing that title and looking vaguely like the game would probably equal at least one big weekend at the box-office. The result is a film that is not only less fun and exciting than playing the game for 105 minutes, it isn’t even as exciting as reading the instruction booklet.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=13269&reviewer=389
originally posted: 10/21/05 14:14:10
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USA
21-Oct-2005 (R)
DVD: 07-Feb-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
27-Oct-2005
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