You must have been lucky (or unlucky) enough to have seen a video game film at some stage in your life. For some once was enough, as films based on video games have a universal reputation for being, quite simply, awful. Decent ratings on movie reviewing site Rotten Tomatoes are few and far between; the best achieve thirty or forty per cent, the worst ten or even (in fact quite often) less. Gagging for the worst (or best?) examples of terrible video game cinema? Possible answers lie below.
Super Mario Bros. was probably the first major video game movie. 1993 was the year that saw Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo take on the now infamous roles. Not surprisingly, the two-dimensional game turned out a fairly two-dimensional film (at least in the eyes of fans and critics, anyway). One has to wonder whether Duke Nukem Forever could do action comedy better.
The less we linger on Double Dragon (which got a unanimous zero per cent rating all round) the better. However, the Mortal Kombat film did pretty well for itself. With thirty-five per cent at Rotten Tomatoes and moderate box office success, it really didn't do too badly (unlike the sequel). Does that actually signify success? For example, a lot of copies of NCAA Football 2012 may be very popular in the sales charts but what if critics end up disliking it? If you want a more recent example of a video game movie try Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Distributed by Disney, it actually fared pretty well. Getting a final score of thirty-six per cent, its mixed reviews almost brought it up to the coveted forty per cent mark.
Are movie tie-in video games generally always bad, too? Video games like LA Noire are allegedly at the level of a well written film. Maybe there is hope still!
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