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The lame game movie night was created with a purpose. As a game journalist and film student, I wanted to understand – to really get at the core of why game movies tend to be so terrible. So I’ve been trudging through the catalogue of game to movie adaptations, two at a time, suffering through it all so you, the reader, can watch from a safe distance. This week, the offerings were two completely lame, action-centric flicks from 2007: BloodRayne II: Deliverance and Hitman.
BloodRayne II is the sequel to the delightfully terrible BloodRayne, a film so bad; it dominated the razzies in 2006. In truth, it was one of those wonderfully stupid films you love to laugh at, and the sheer weight of talent (Kristanna Lokan, Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen, Billy Zane, Michelle Rodriguez, all of whom have proven star power) made the film the ultimate “WTF were they thinking!” guilty pleasure.
BloodRayne II has none of this. The plot basically boils down to our heroine Rayne (a half human, half vampire warrior) fighting cowboy vampires in the American Wild West. This should be awesomely, stupidly bad, and at least on par with the first film’s schlocky, vaguely middle-ages European setting, but the new digs are poorly utilized. In fact, the film is incredibly, painfully boring. The action is slow, the scenes are awkwardly staged, and the cinematography consists almost entirely of shaky handheld shots and long takes.
I’m not even going to comment on how wacky the premise is (Rayne travels to the Wild West to conquer vampirized Billy the Kid?) because the film doesn’t revel in its own insanity. If you know your movie is bad, you should live it up for laughs (hey, it worked for DOA).
Once I recovered suitably, I watched Hitman, which is dumb in an altogether different way. The film plays out like a poor man’s The Bourne Identity – fast on action, with an enigmatic, nearly superhuman protagonist, plenty of fights and stunts, etc. and rapid-fire cutting to keep the pace at breakneck speed.
The movie follows the mysterious agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant), a professional assassin born into the organization (a collective of hitmen trained from childhood, they also have barcode tattoos on their heads). 47 gets involved in a set-up involving a Russian politician, a hit gone wrong, and the beautiful Nika (Olga Kurylenko).
Like The Bourne Identity, the film follows our hero and his gorgeous tag-a-long as he kicks ass and tries to find out what’s going on. Unlike the vastly superior Bourne, Hitman is stupid, badly written, and oddly misogynist (I don’t think there’s one female character who isn’t a prostitute or love slave of some kind). While it’s cool that the film features all sorts of little sight gags and homage’s to the game series (at one point, 47 breaks in to a hotel room where two kids are actually playing Hitman: Blood Money), this does not make for a good movie.
Surely, the film is about a thousand times better than BloodRayne II, and fans may dig it for it’s relative faithfulness to the series. But it’s hard (read: impossible) to get excited over an action flick that’s been done so much better in so many other places.
Overall, it was a fairly lackluster lame game movie night. Generally, one of my pairings is tolerable, be it spectacularly, hilariously bad (like the original BloodRayne) or enjoyable and just this side of stupid (like Resident Evil). Tonight? Let’s just say that hideously boring (and bad) and completely cliché (and lame) make a volatile, unhappy concoction. Don’t try this at home.
Read [Lame Game Movie Nights pt. 5]
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