Doom

Rating: C-

Doom revolutionized video games as we know it as one of the first and the best at the time first person shooter. Doom the movie will not do the same thing for horror/action movies.

Doom is the story of a group of Marines, led by the Rock, who travel to Mars via some sort of stargate to quelch some sort of outbreak at a research facility. They get a lot more than they bargin for as characters from the game attack. You know that there will be tons of shooting, big guns, machismo for days, blood and guts, and lots of death, but what you might not know from the ads is the focus of this movie is not the Rock so much as it is on Karl Urban and his sister Die Another Day's Rosamund Pike. She's actually the second James Bond alum to be in a video game movie. Colin Salmon, who plays Charles Robinson from MI6 was in Resident Evil and gets chopped to little bits by the lasers. This is a dirty trick last seen in Stealth, advertised as a Jamie Foxx movie, only to fool us into seeing a horrible Josh Lucas flick.

This type of movie draws inevitable comparisons to others of the same ilk. The squad of marines does not nearly have the same charisma or likableness of say, the team in Predator. Also, the basic plot and pretty much everything is a Resident Evil clone, to be honest. This movie is extremely predictable. I read in Entertainment Weekly that there is some big twist at the end that you won't see coming, but I really didn't notice anything, and you probably won't either.

The movie loses most of is respectability when it switches into full-on video game mode for a segment where it looks like you're really playing the game on the big screen. There are a few nice gamer touches like shooting your own reflection on a wall, but for the most part, it's laughable.

The special effects are nice, but don't expect much from the plot or it's actors. It seems we say that a lot nowadays. I don't see the Rock following Arnold into politics mostly because Arnold at least had successful movies and even though they were over the top and cheesy, they reveled in their outlandishness and never took themselves that seriously. The Rock should take a page from that, or try a different style of movie. He was great in Be Cool.

Skip this one. There are much better movies out there and need some more attention than this heavily promoted bloated, predictible, effects laden popcorn flick. Now on to the Halo movie...