5 bad video game movies that are still better than “Borderlands”

Back in the In the mid-2000s, before he became one of the biggest movie stars in the world, Dwayne Johnson was just the Rock, just getting his start as an actor. Back then, a movie like Downfall seemed like the perfect vehicle for the pro wrestler turned action star. Popular video game IP? Check. Sci-fi action and minimal dialogue? Check. A damn big gun? Triple check.

With the combination of a hellishly entertaining source material and a likeable young star, Johnson could have actually brought all the checks to the bank, but it didn’t quite work out. Instead Downfall ended up as a curiosity: a theater flop that is not nearly as bad as one would think, but both the charisma of its cast and the very simple concept of the game. This is all wasted potential.

Downfall takes the basics of a game about mowing down demons on Mars and turns it into something more normal. Set in the year 2046, it centers on a group of Marines led by Johnson (Sarge) and Karl Urban (Reaper) on a mission to an interdimensional portal called the Ark. Scientists have been messing around with portals and genetic experiments and have unleashed hell. Not the literal hell like in the games, but a less offensive, more generic hell in space where hideous monsters mutated by an artificial 24th pair of chromosomes slaughter humans en masse.

Under the direction of Andrzej Bartkowiak (Cradle 2 the grave), everything from the set to the lighting looks amateurish. The scenes are simultaneously too dark and overexposed, and the monster effects wouldn’t even scare a child on a ghost hayride. And yet somehow it all comes together to create a bargain bin version. Aliensculminating in a wonderfully silly recreation of the game’s first-person shooter perspective in a single-shot haunted house sequence.

A main reason Downfall is so interesting because it has only one good idea: a late slip-up in which Johnson becomes infected and becomes the film’s true monster. The twist results in Urban’s Reaper, the film’s actual protagonist and all-around good guy, taking up arms to kill a possessed Johnson. The change infuriated fans at the time, and many felt betrayed by the marketing of Johnson as the film’s star, but in hindsight, it’s an anomaly we’ll likely never see again. In most of the action hero’s films, he saves the day. Here, he gets completely vaporized.

Downfall has a reputation for being bad, but honestly it could be worse. The sequel, 2019 Doom: Annihilationis an even cheaper horror film that retells the story with a completely unknown cast that will leave you completely awestruck. Event horizonEyes scratched out and stuff.