Top 5 Movies Based on Video Games

I’m a sucker for zombies, and I thought this movie was pretty cool. It never quite captured the atmosphere of the very popular game series upon which it was based, but in many regards it did work. I think they could have done without some of the bad CGI for the animated monsters, and instead just stuck to the zombie part for better scares. The sequels were fairly mediocre, but again because they didn’t seem to follow the style of the video games. At least Milla Jovovich is easy on the eyes.

This movie is based on the horror game which was a little like Resident Evil. I was pretty impressed by how genuinely creepy the movie turned out to be, even if it didn’t make a whole lot of sense. The story involves an old asylum, weird twisted realities, and much more that is kind of hard to follow. At the center of it is a woman looking for her child. This movie was made by French director Christopher Gans, who previously did the excellent Brotherhood of the Wolf, and definitely worth checking out even if you never played the games.

I thought the original Mortal Kombat movie was pretty cool. It took the fighting game and made a story out of it, and it did feature some genuinely cool martial arts and special effects. I think it deserves credit just for taking the idea behind the game and actually pulling a plot out of all the violence. You can probably just skip the sequels, but as far as the series goes this movie wasn’t that bad at all. It did very well at the box office, and is one of the most successful video game movies ever made.

This is another very successful video game movie, mainly because it features Angelina Jolie in the title role. When the best part of the end sequence is a five-second shot of her running in slow motion, you know what to expect from the rest of the movie. It’s kind of silly and campy, but so was the game if you think about it. This movie also features Daniel Craig several years before he became the new 007. Forget about the sequel – it was a box office bomb that put an end to the series, which is probably for the best.

Timothy Olyphant shaved his head for the title role of this movie, where he plays a cold-hearted assassin who gets mixed up in a scandal. I actually saw this one at the theater and liked it, although there wasn’t much to the story. What I liked was how it captured the game in movie form, plus it had a lot of dark humor. There was one scene where the Hitman walks in on some kids actually playing the Hitman game, which was funny. This one had a modest reception at the box office and I doubt any sequels will be made.