Level Up: Video Game Movies that Didn’t Need Video Games

Feature

Sep 27

There are a handful of words that exist within film conversations, a handful of words that when uttered together, be it in person or typed frantically in a venomous engagement of social media discourse, send a biting chill down the spines of cinemagoers everywhere and alternatively flicks on a lightbulb atop the head of hard-pressed studio executives. No, not Space Jam 3: Snooker Toons or ‘surprise random origin flick of a character from a long-gestating franchise’, but a collection of words as likely to encourage a groan as the words ‘Scorsese’ and ‘Marvel’ slammed together in a clickbait headline. These words in question? Video game adaptation. And with a worse track-record than movie-game tie-ins, it’s no wonder that these words cause such a fuss. From infamous early efforts such as the Annabel Jankel/Rocky Morton directed Super Mario Bros. back in 1993 through to Doom in the early 2000s, to more recent turnouts such as Hitman: Agent 47 and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, it’s safe to say that in terms of shifting from screen to big screen, video game adaptations have had a hard time. While critical attitudes towards 8-bit adaptations can be argued as slightly shifting in their favour with the warmly received Pokémon: Detective Pikachu and 2020’s Sonic the Hedgehog, the commercial success of video game adaptations continues to soar, with a slate of sequels planned for both prior-mentioned films and franchises like Resident Evil, drawing in more than a billion dollars at the worldwide box office. With such a feverish audience demand for video game adaptations despite the near-relentless critical panning, a question begs to be asked for what audiences look for in adaptations of their favourite video games: relentless action and a coherent story? Rich visuals and heaps of fan service? Or, like the namesake of a joy-con, hours of fun and escapism? Does the strong demand for video-game movies arise from licensed titles, or can it be attributed to individual elements allowing a film to function almost as a video game in itself? Is it possible for films that aren’t directly drawn from any particular video game franchise or IP to replicate elements of these more loyal adaptations? What follows is an exploration of video game movies; movies that function as effective video game adaptations without being adapted or in any way derived from anything found on a console. These movies are bold, exciting, grand, often silly and, more importantly, fun.

To begin with, a film that is arguably the closest to an insane first-person looter-shooter on the big screen, Ilya Naishuller’s unapologetically wild, near vertigo-inducing Hardcore Henry. Originally spawning from Naishuller’s passionate love of video games, with Assassins Creed and Left4Dead cited as strong influences on the film’s production, Hardcore Henry positions the viewer behind the eyes of Henry, a reanimated cyborg shooting, exploding, and maiming his way through heaps and heaps of enemies in order to save his wife from a typically forgettable supervillain – essentially, a bonkers action shooter that effectively functions as Mario on crack. While Henry’s story is admittedly hollow and the first-person cinematography can occasionally leave you feeling a little woozy as he leaps and rolls and clings to helicopters at several hundred feet, Naishuller’s tight approach to action and wild set-pieces – complete with flamethrowers and Sharlto Copley in multiple roles and accents – are reminiscent of many an outlandish first-person shooter, casting story and logic aside in favour of a loud, gory good time. Those who ever find themselves wanting to see Bulletstorm or Borderlands or Duke Nukem: Forever on the big screen, will likely enjoy Hardcore Henry.

While Hardcore Henry’s intense action mirrors a handful of first-person shooter titles: there are movies that function almost entirely as cinematic adaptations of one particular game in their structure. A primary example can be found in Tony D’Aquino’s 2019 Shudder-exclusive slasher The Furies. Behind its tacky exterior and thinly-written characters, The Furies effectively operates as a straight-up adaptation of the hit multiplayer game Dead by Daylight, albeit without recognisable horror icons in the slasher role. Following a young woman named Kayla (Airlie Dodds) as she awakens in a forest clearing only to discover that she is being hunted by various derivatively garbed slasher archetypes wielding familiar weapons – axe, machete etc – and has to outlive others trapped alongside her in order to ‘win’ the game. Overcoming the restraints of its small budget with a tonne of nasty surprises, impressive costume work and some fantastic practical gore effects, The Furies takes the central premise of Dead by Daylight and runs with it to craft one of the more enjoyable and simple slashers of recent years. One can only hope that should a Dead by Daylight film ever somehow land in development, they’ll allow Tony D’Aquino to take the helm and serve up a game-accurate second course.

While Hardcore Henry and The Furies find success in suggestive stylistic choices directly reminiscent of popular video game titles, other video game movies can be argued as far more explicit in their derivation. A shining example can be found in director John Erick Dowdle’s 2014 horror romp As Above So Below, a claustrophobic found-footage gem that arguably operates as a finer cinematic jaunt for Lara Croft than the three licensed adaptations that have already been released. Dowdle’s film captures the exploits of rogue adventurer Scarlett Marlowe (the wonderful Perdita Weeks), a young British explorer and her quirky crew picking up a lead from her dead father, exploring the catacombs of Paris to search for an ancient artifact capable of granting eternal life. If that doesn’t sound Tomb Raider enough for even the most passionate of fans, Marlowe finds herself embroiled in even deeper Croftian hijinks when the Catacombs are revealed as a gateway to the seven layers of Hell. What follows is a tight, genuinely frightening jaunt through enclosed passages, demon-filled caverns and blood-soaked encounters that feels incredibly suggestive of Croft and her post-2013 revamp, and while the final act plumets into frustrating found-footage tropes – cheap jumpscares, frustrating shaky-cam muddying the action and a lacklustre ending – fans may very well find in this horror what the most recent Raider flick failed to deliver, fun.

While the prior-mentioned examples have struck video-game gold in deliberately referencing and constructing themselves around video-game iconography, it is important to consider a subgenre that began as a creative spin on the tired romcom formula with Harold Ramis’ classic Groundhog Day, only to slowly shift and further commit itself to video-game risk-and-reward plotting and storytelling in more recent years, the subgenre of the time-loop film. While Groundhog Day is an arguable video-game movie in itself, with Phil Connors (Bill Murray) trying and failing repeatedly in violent and slapstick ways to escape his dire situation, it has become a recurring theme and almost a gag in contemporary time-loop films, from Palm Springs to Koko-di Koko-da to most recently Joe Carnahan’s Boss Level, to question or poke fun at the idea of being trapped in a sick game or simulation. The time-loop film that arguably functions as a video game movie at its finest is found in the Doug Liman’s 2014 Tom Cruise vehicle Edge of Tomorrow. Charting the horrific adventure of PR officer William Cage (Cruise) trapped in a constant loop of landing on an battleground against alien invaders only to be brutally killed moments later, Edge of Tomorrow forgoes the typical approach of the time-loop subgenre, avoiding a tempting explicit homage to Groundhog Day, almost a creative box-tick in movies of this kind, in favour of becoming a smart slice of blockbuster sci-fi with terrific action sequences and a souls-like grind approach to its story structure. In order to proceed beyond being blown to smithereens or crushed by machinery or killed by friendly fire, Cage finds himself in the company of Sergeant Rita Vrataski (an excellent Emily Blunt), using her knowledge of the battlefield and his own ability to respawn to grind their way toward a convenient stop-button Omega variant of the creatures and bring the war to an end for good. While the central romance and character drama finds itself buried under the weight of marvellous special effects and breakneck action plotting, fans seeking a well-paced riff on time-loop movies with a video-game like structure will be more than satisfied with this Groundhog Doom-like blockbuster.

Though not directly functioning nor suggestive of any particular video game title, it’s impossible to compile an argument for video game films without mentioning Gore Verbinski’s underrated slice of gothic horror A Cure For Wellness. While its grandiose design and a story built around Dane Dehaan’s Lockhart, an executive caught in a scandal sent to bring back a colleague from a mysterious retreat in the Alps who finds himself trapped in a labyrinth of spooky basement floors, hidden chambers and underground caverns filled with all manners of horrors are deeply reminiscent of the multi-layered maps in the original Resident Evil trilogy or more modern horror titles such as Outlast by design, it’s the relation to Verbinski’s now-cancelled Bioshock adaptation that warrants attention here. With its swamp-coloured flickering corridors, mysterious and maniacal rich villain (Jason Isaacs) echoing Bioshock’s own Andrew Ryan, a helping of body horror and heaps of slithering mutated eels, A Cure For Wellness stands as a bloated yet beautiful teaser for what might have been.

All in all, while direct video game adaptations vary wildly in quality and don’t appear to be powering off anytime soon – at the time of writing this article, images from Eli Roth’s Borderlands have been revealed followed quickly by the announcement of Idris Elba’s casting in the Sonic sequel – there appear to be a number of factors that draw audiences to them time and time again, while also steadily garnering more positive attention from critics. While a couple of the examples here adhere to the tradition of being mauled by critics and rejected by audiences, with A Cure For Wellness and As Above So Below receiving the harshest of critical blows and Wellness receiving a dire turnout at the box office, the other examples cited of Hardcore Henry, The Furies and Edge of Tomorrow have been popular with audiences and more warmly received by reviewers, united in praise for their focus on fun, strength of practical craft and dedication to strong action sequences and extravagant set-pieces. While this may suggest an exhaustion with overstuffed effects-driven blockbusters or jump scare-heavy found-footage efforts, in a time where more and more video games are being rewritten and digested as screenplays and television series, it becomes clear that audiences and critics alike, much like turning on a console for a few hours, are looking to have fun.