The Last of Us is a brilliant video game. It’s beautifully put together, genuinely frightening and – most importantly – has the ability to emotionally kick you in the gut whenever it wants. It’s a masterpiece. So the news that it might be turned into a film has left me feeling a little antsy.
On the one hand, The Last of Us: The Movie might end up being just as terrific and suspenseful as the game. At the very least , it’ll certainly have far fewer scenes where Joel crouches down, stands up, flicks his torch on and off 20 times in a row and then runs full-pelt into a wall than when I play it. But then again, when games are made into films, the results tend to be nightmarishly bad. I’ll pick five at random, because there isn’t enough space on the internet for me to list every bad video game adaptation. They’re all terrible.
Doom (2007)
Doom began life as a revolutionary first-person shooter about a solitary nameless marine who fights his way through wave after waves of demons in hell to prevent the world being overrun by evil. Then, in 2005, some idiot decided to make it a vehicle for the Rock and Rosamund Pike. There’s no mention of hell. Nobody looks like they’ve ever played the game. Not even the involvement of the Rock, who usually at least puts some effort into showing us that he’s above the muck he’s cast in, can stop this from being unstoppably boring.
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)
In the mid-90s, Lara Croft became a pop culture phenomenon, all because some genius worked out that Indiana Jones would be better if he had boobs and made a gratuitous orgasm noise whenever he walked into the side of a cave. As a game, this worked perfectly. As a film – where Angelina Jolie wrangles up an Elizabeth Hurley impression that’s somehow even more wooden than its source material, and leaps around making boogly eyes at Daniel Craig to godawful dance music while the bloke from The Brittas Empire pulls a selection of funny faces at her – it did not. A sequel was made, because people are awful.
The Prince of Persia (2009)
Prince of Persia started off as an Aladdin-inspired platform adventure game notable for its incredibly fluid animation. But then, 21 years later, Jerry Bruckheimer inexplicably decided to turn it into the world’s most muddled Pirates of the Caribbean rip-off. Jake Gyllenhaal played the titular character who, despite being an Iranian from a thousand years ago, somehow has a cheeky gorblimey cockney accent. Presumably Danny Dyer had already passed on the role. Still, this film should act as a blueprint for everything that Michael Fassbender should avoid when he makes his Assassin’s Creed film. That and the animus. If Michael Fassbender mentions the animus even once in the Assassin’s Creed film, I’m out.
Super Mario Bros (1993)
Everyone knows Super Mario – the game about a little Italian plumber who tries to save his prospective love interest from the clutches of a berserk monster in a far-away land. Everyone, that is, apart from the people who made the Super Mario Bros movie. They thought it was about a man who looks like but isn’t Danny DeVito chasing a magical rock around Brooklyn to stop a germaphobe dictator from devolving all humans into sort of mutant dinosaur things. Nothing in film history has ever been so pointlessly overthought as Super Mario Bros, with the possible exception of Nora Ephron’s Bewitched remake.
Anything that Uwe Boll has ever gone within 50 feet of
House of the Dead. Alone in the Dark. Alone in the Dark II. BloodRayne. BloodRayne II: Deliverance. BloodRayne: The Third Reich. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. Postal. Far Cry. Some of these were acceptable video games once. Not any more. Not after Uwe Boll mangled them all out of shape with his witless ham-hands. One of these films has Jason Statham in it, and it’s still unwatchable. Imagine.
