Get Your Hand Off My Joystick
Movie studios should just stop trying. There will never be another video game adaptation as good as Super Mario Bros.
Films based on video games historically have had very little success. Whether it’s because of the fact that 100 percent of the time it’s more fun to actually play a video game than to watch one played out for you on the big screen or because something about video game adaptations tends to attract sub-par talent such as Uwe Boll or Paul W.S. Anderson, video games simply do not work as motion pictures.
That hasn’t stopped Hollywood from trying, though.
Case in point: this year’s release of Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, or as I like to call it, Street Fighter: The One Without Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Yes, the movie is the second live-action adaptation of the popular fighting game. The first, a 1994 film that had the unfortunate distinction of being Raul Julia’s last film, was recently released on Blu-ray — for those of you who’ve always wanted to watch a terrible movie in 1080p high definition resolution.
Other video game adaptations that will be released this year include Tekken, King of Fighters, The Legend of Spyro and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
With new video games being released every week, there will never be a shortage of games for Hollywood producers to look to for inspiration — thus, there will never be a shortage of bad video game movies to mock.
Never one to get in the way of progress, though, I have a few video games ripe for the picking in the celluloid cabbage patch that is development hell. Here are some hypothetical films coming to a theater near you:
- Pac-Man — Jonah Hill stars as a yellow HAZMAT suit-clad space miner struggling with addictions to both little white pills and spontaneously generated fruit baskets. As he battles his inner demons, he must also face the vengeful ghosts of the multi-ethnic miners he replaced after they died due to becoming lost in the mine’s mazes.
- Duck Hunt — Josh Brolin is The Hunter, a good ol’ boy from Texas who enjoys hunting ducks with his wisecracking canine companion (voiced by Chris Tucker). When a mysterious virus turns the world’s duck population into deadly killing machines, The Hunter is America’s best chance at salvation. Armed only with an orange and grey laser gun, it’s always duck season for The Hunter.
- Dance Dance Revolution — Society has sunk into a dark totalitarian regime this side of Orwell’s 1984. All forms of expression have been outlawed and creativity is punishable by death. It’s up to Johnny B. Smooth (as played by Zac Efron) to save the populace with the only weapon he knows: dance. Using every tactic in his arsenal (from The Shuffle to The Robot to The Running Man), Smooth will bring about revolution with his dance — or make a fool of himself trying.
- Tetris — When Steve Jackson (Jason Stratham) was falsely accused of murdering his wife, little did he know he was about to become part of the cutthroat world of prison block building. Forced to compete in the national televised competitions, Jackson has two choices — build walls out of the highly combustible, oddly shaped bricks he has been given or be shot by the prison guards. In order to escape, he’s going to need to build his way out — one brick at a time.
I think you have a couple Blockbusters there.