Movie Review: Doom
For the love of the game
Sure, it's damning with faint praise, but Doom really is better than it should be, or even than it needs to be. After all, it's simply another violent, formulaic action picture, existing solely to wring some profit out of its mostly young-guy target audience, all of whom will be familiar with the video game it's based on.
Using a video game -- rather than, say, a novel -- as source material brings with it certain restrictions. Like the games themselves, a game-based film has to be loud and explosive and full of relentless action. If you don't get anything else but that, you get the kind of filmmaking that's not much different than the graphics of a video game, adding real people but subtracting the direct audience participation, which makes one of those pictures about as engaging as watching your nephew kill aliens on his PlayStation.
There've been plenty of those over the past couple of years. But give credit to cinematographer-turned-director Andrzej Bartkowiak (Romeo Must Die), veteran scripter Wesley Strick (True Believer, Wolf), and his co-writer David Callaham (a rookie screenwriter who, according to press materials, spends his spare time participating in "play-by-mail imaginary professional wrestling"). They've crafted a movie with some fairly engaging characters, a couple of plot surprises, and a few decent horror moments that, at their best, give off a distinct Alien vibe.
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, the big-time pro wrestler who seems to have made a successful leap to action cinema, plays Sarge, head of the usual hard-bitten band of macho misfits with itchy trigger fingers. In this near-future scenario, they travel instantly via a "portal" from Earth to Mars to check out some weirdness at a research facility.
When they get there they find no dearth of alien monsters and zombies (although brassieres seem to be in short supply), as well as lots of dead scientists and a striking live researcher named Dr. Sam Grimm (Rosamund Pike of Die Another Day). Her relationship with a member of Sarge's team, a fellow nicknamed the Reaper (Karl Urban),is one of the film's first surprises.
It's not long before Sam and the boys are up to their elbows in corpses, animated and otherwise, with much carnage ensuing. As his men split up and confront the planet's horrors, Sarge butches around the place with a weapon the size of a 500-gallon propane tank, incinerating anything that moves. Eventually, the film kicks into the obligatory looks-just-like-the-game scenes. That's about the time it starts getting a lot less interesting, and an overlong showdown at the end doesn't pick things up much.
Still, for those who wish to look, there are some good things here, such as Richard Brake's performance as the redneck Portman -- he seems to be channeling Bruce Dern's slimy villain in 1972's The Cowboys -- and some interesting lines ("Sarge, we've got a problem - one of our dead scientists is missing!") There's even a little stab at a theme about genetic predisposition to evil.
All of that doesn't mean that Doom is a great movie. When it comes to features based on video games, however, it's got to be in the top five. And, yeah, there's that damning with faint praise again.
***
