Movies based on video games are usually a recipe for disaster. It’s not very easy to just transfer one medium of entertainment to another and just assume the success and level of quality will spill over. Sometimes however, the stars are perfectly aligned and a movie comes out that’s based on a video game and totally worth watching. It’s still not Oscar material, but we don’t really expect that from video game movies, do we? Let’s see what Hollywood has given us so far.
Tomb Raider
The latest Tomb Raider movie wasn’t just based on the video game, it was practically the video game. That’s probably a good choice since the latest Tomb Raider games have all had a very action-packed and cinematic story, which translates a lot easier to a movie than the previous iterations did.
Mortal Kombat
The recent Mortal Kombat movie isn’t just watchable, it’s actually pretty good. The fights are well-choreographed, the characters are done correctly and it has the gruesome gore fatalities you’d expect from anything Mortal Kombat. The story isn’t all that, but the games don’t have a good story either so you know what you’re getting into.
Silent Hill
The first Silent Hill movie was genuinely a good horror movie with great acting and even – dare I say it – a decent story that manages to captivate you for its entire runtime. It has the typical things you’d expect from a Silent Hill movie but it’s all done so well that you could even enjoy this movie without knowing anything about Silent Hill or ever having played one of the games.
Rampage
Let’s be honest: The Rock is in everything but he rarely disappoints. When he talked about making a Rampage movie, we all laughed. Then the movie came out and we still laughed. But we also had to sort of admit that we were laughing because we enjoyed the thrill that the movie provides. The Rock took just the core concept of the video game (“Big Ape Smash Buildings!”) and got rid of everything else, and that was probably for the best.
Monster Hunter
If you can ignore the awkward story in this movie, it’s actually pretty good. Then again, if you ignore the story in Monster Hunter (heck, even if you take the story into account) it’s just a game about regular people hunting insanely big monsters to make better weapons to hunt bigger monsters. The bar wasn’t exactly set very high, but this movie manages to barely jump over it.
Uncharted
The movie hasn’t been out all that long so time will tell if this one holds up, but much like the Tomb Raider movie it’s based on a video game series that’s known for being very cinematic. It should be relatievely easy to translate to a decent enough movie and the cast is nothing to scoff at either, so we’re giving this one the benefit of the doubt for now!
Resident Evil
Full disclosure: we’re talking about the first two, maybe three Resident Evil movies. Everything that came after that was laughably bad. They were still entertaining, but mostly entertaining because you had no idea film studios would still pay hundreds of millions of dollars to keep churning out such bad movies. The first ones were decent though. Not good, but decent.
