Sonic the Hedgehog is finally spinning into theaters this weekend after several months of visible results tweaking to right the ghoulish mistake that was the title character’s unique design. The movie will mark the newest video sport adaptation to hit theaters, a dragon that Hollywood has been chasing for over a quarter century and still hasn’t managed to fairly get proper. Because not like movie adaptations of different "low" art akin to comedian books, we’ve still but to see a video game movie that was actually, truly good.

I do not know why that's. Making a film out of established manufacturers is fairly hit-or-miss (for each The Lego Movie there are round 30 of TheEmoji Movie), so the temptation to just make a bland movie out of long-established tropes and slap a Final Fantasy logo on it might be arduous to overcome. And in some cases, like 1993’s Super Mario Bros., the problem appears to stem from a scarcity of any actual movie-in a position narrative within the supply material, forcing the filmmakers to create their motion pictures primarily based on what they think the sport is about and ending up with a film that could best be described as secondhand reporting of a criminal offense scene.

That mentioned, while there might not be any truly good video sport films, there are definitely fun video sport movies, and some which have managed to become classics. I’ve finished my finest to rank each one from Worst to Greatest, with a view notable caveats, as a result of because it turns on the market are a shitload of them. My listing excludes any animated films (though I genuinely favored Ratchet & Clank), because if I begin making an attempt to rank all of the Pokémon and Street Fighter animes I will simply turn to mud in my chair. I also excluded a couple of straight-to-DVD and worldwide releases, most notably the Tekken films and DOA: Dead or Alive, because I’m never fucking watching these films. But aside from that, this list is pretty definitive, so learn on to find which are value a rental and which ought to go the best way of the Nintendo Cereal System.

25. Every Uwe Boll Movie

Uwe Boll has made a career out of filming tax shelters masquerading as video recreation adaptations, and each single one in all his movies is unhealthy in a uniquely baffling approach. House of the Dead, which is without doubt one of the few Boll films to get a theatrical release within the U.S., may also be his finest. It’s cheesy as hell and it has nothing to do with the video game sequence (which only ever had the barest bones of tales), but it has a weird charm that Boll never manages to recapture. I’ll be brief with the remainder, as a result of they’re all acidic trash heaps: Alone at midnight options Christian Slater’s widow’s peak and an unintentionally hilarious chase scene set to a steel drum solo, BloodRayne is softcore nerd porn starring Oscar winner Ben Kingsley, Postal is an 8chan thread come to life, Within the Name of the King features Ray Liotta as an evil medieval wizard dressed like a Johnny Cash roadie, and much Cry has a bizarre cameo by Anthony Bourdain. There, I’ve just saved you 7 ½ hours of eye-searing terribality.

24. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation takes all of the good will of the earlier film and pawns it for a collection of Pogs based mostly on forgotten properties of the ‘90s, akin to Eek! The Cat, or The Incredible Crash Test Dummies. The movie recasts all but two of the lead actors from the original and appears to have been filmed in between takes on the set of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys with costumes stolen from Party City. Despite this movie coming out two years after Mortal Kombat, the visual effects are one way or the other worse, and they are used to create such memorable scenes as transforming The X-Files’ Brian Thompson right into a dragon. There are more named characters in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation than within the entirety of Game of Thrones, and most of them die simply as shortly. Unless they merely disappear, which additionally occurs!

23. Double Dragon

I can write approximately a hundred phrases about 1994’s Double Dragon, and most of them can be about the constellation of hair unfold throughout Robert Patrick’s skull. He has a bleached-blond excessive prime fade and a ‘90s coffee shop goatee. He appears to be like like a police sketch artist’s interpretation of one of many Thundercats on their option to a job interview. He appears to be like like an alternate head for a Vanilla Ice doll. He appears to be like like he sued A Flock of Seagulls for defamation in 1983. Somehow, The best movies about Gaming Patrick is the villain of this bizarrely kid-friendly but weirdly grotesque adaptation of the gritty beat-em-up arcade collection Double Dragon. Despite the presence of the gloriously delightful Mark Dacascos, this movie is aggressively horrible, and ought to be avoided in any respect prices.

22. Wing Commander

Wing Commander is a movie that came out in 1999 in each potential means you possibly can interpret that phrase. Its lead actors are Freddie Prinze, Jr., Matthew Lillard, and Deep Blue Sea’s Saffron Burrows. Famously hated by fans of the sport collection although it was written and directed by the game’s creator (who also grew to hate the film), the film is sort of a terrible stay-motion model of Titan A.E. with godawful special results and boring characters. There’s just about no conflict past the usual "we must defeat the evil aliens" trope, and contemplating we barely see the aforementioned aliens, it’s arduous to really get invested in anything that’s going on. Prinze has a particularly embarrassing role to play because the particular boy with probably the most ludicrous super powers in the history of science fiction and fantasy. Worst of all, Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell are nowhere to be discovered.

21. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li will endlessly be remembered as the road Fighter film nobody had any thought existed. Quietly launched in February of 2009 to theater-going audiences who wished completely nothing to do with it, the movie rapidly faded into obscurity to such a degree that I often have to offer photographic proof to convince folks I’m not making it up. It’s the Jonah Hex of video sport adaptations. It inexplicably features Oscar nominee Michael Clarke Duncan getting impaled by a frozen pipe, and whereas that will sound like stable B movie motion cheese, the film is so generic and boring that it takes a physical toll on you simply to look at it. Imagine buying and selling a portion of your immortal soul to watch the street Fighter: The Movie arcade game in entice mode for 90 minutes, and you’ve basically gained the expertise of watching The Legend of Chun-Li.

20. Max Payne

Max Payne exists within the shadow realm of films made within the aughts that are destined to grow to be bar trivia questions each staff is just too drunk to answer. I fully forgot this movie existed, and if we’re being completely trustworthy, I additionally forgot about the game. The titular police detective is on a quest for vengeance after his spouse and child are killed, which sees him blasting his manner through corrupt politicians and enterprise moguls to get to the reality. The sport was a cool neo-noir motion title with some interesting plot twists and a fun "bullet time" mechanic, but the movie is a boring slog of confusion. For some inexplicable reason, the filmmakers altered or outright removed enormous sections of the plot, leaving the movie a jumbled mess that not even fans of the game could decipher. Bewilderingly, the film dipped its beak into the supernatural and added literal demons, which are 100% not in the sport. Imagine somebody rebooting Chinatown and throwing in a few werewolves, and you’ll get an thought of how much of a tonal shift the film was from the source material. It would really be much less harmful for you to burn the Max Payne DVD and breathe in the toxic fumes than to ever watch it.

19. Silent Hill: Revelation

Take all the positive issues you've got ever felt a couple of movie, wrap these things in an outdated Freddy Kruger t-shirt, then set the shirt on fireplace and throw it down a haunted mine shaft, shouting sentence fragments at all of it the best way down. That’s the gist of Silent Hill: Revelation, a boring-ass kaleidoscope of played-out horror movie tropes and varsity-stage gibberish masquerading as dialogue. This sequel to the 2006 authentic is a terrible film with absolutely zero redeeming qualities, and it deserves nothing less than to by no means be watched by anybody. Sean Bean, reprising his position from the earlier movie, manages to defy the percentages and survive as soon as again, making him two-for-two within the Silent Hill sequence, so I assume that’s notable. That said, he does wander away into mist at the top to seek out his missing household and we by no means got a Silent Hill 3, so maybe he did die.

18. Hitman: Agent forty seven

Hitman: Agent 47 is the second Hitman film in a row to make the essential error of not casting Jason Statham because the titular bald assassin. Perhaps he felt the collection was too similar to his Transporter franchise, perhaps the production couldn’t afford him, or perhaps the script was so bad he did a dazzling sequence of kicks to eject the producers from his office for even bringing him a replica. There's a slight possibility that the makers of Hitman: Agent 47 by no means even approached Statham, but the very notion is so foolish I don’t need to contemplate it any further. Anyway, this sequel/reboot recasts the role vacated by Timothy Olyphant with Rupert Friend, and when you just mentioned, "Who?", please consider skipping this film ceaselessly, because it has nothing to give you. Zachary Quinto co-stars as a bulletproof villain who gets electrocuted into a weird ghost human in a submit-credit sequence, which is nearly definitely a reference to the game collection but one which I don't perceive. It's a remarkably unhealthy movie loaded with the kind of CGI-augmented action that I discover boring and lame.

17. Super Mario Bros.

1993’s Super Mario Bros. has the distinction of being the primary ever movie based mostly on a video recreation, and the primary film wherein Hollywood legend Dennis Hopper is mutated into Nickelodeon slime by an underselling Nintendo peripheral. Helmed by two commercial administrators who had additionally co-created the 1980s British television character Max Headroom, the production famously went by way of a number of rewrites before landing on the actually bizarre concept of "Blade Runner But With Dinosaurs". The production design on the film is legitimately impressive and unique, which is a disgrace, as a result of the movie itself is a rampaging dumpster fire. It’s boring and dense and doesn’t appear to have any thought of the place any of this is going, which is probably the result of the script being revised every day. Essentially the most notable thing about Super Mario Bros. is arguably the truth that the soar boots utilized by Mario and Luigi have been later worn by Nicolas Cage in the thrilling 1997 docudrama Face/Off.

16. Street Fighter

Listen. If you’re judging the standard of a film based on how nicely it stands the take a look at of time, how much it contributes to the culture, and the way laborious it tries to convince you that Jean Claude Van Damme was born in America, Street Fighter deserves to be within the upper echelon. 1994’s Street Fighter is concurrently the greatest and most embarrassing movie of that year, Shawshank be damned. Essentially taking the characters from Street Fighter II and assigning them random roles in a family-pleasant motion plot, the movie appears like a mixture of G.I. Joe and American Gladiators. The crowning jewel of the film, and the reason it must be entered into the library of congress and protected at all prices, is Raúl Juliá’s hamboniest of hambone performances as the villainous M. Bison. Street Fighter is the dumbest factor in the entire whole universe, and that i watch it every time it comes on Tv. If for no other reason, it deserves respect for Juliá’s immortal line, "For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday."

15. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Full disclosure - I convinced my brothers to go together with me to see Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in the theater, because I assumed it might be good. I drove an hour to see it. I bought popcorn. I thought possibly that since producer Jerry Bruckheimer had just lately struck gold in an traditionally unsuccessful style with the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, a few of that magic mud may sprinkle over to the world of video recreation movies. This was an incorrect assumption. Prince of Persia is top-of-the-line-trying dull movies I’ve ever seen. Jake Gyllenhaal performs a Caucasian Middle Eastern prince with a British accent, and exhibits zero chemistry along with his co-star Gemma Artereton. Ben Kingsley additionally collects a paycheck, and there's a bizarre quantity of screen time devoted to Alfred Molina’s stable of racing ostriches. It’s a very massive swing for Disney and a fair greater miss.

14. Need for Speed

The very first thing it's essential to find out about Need for Speed is that Aaron Paul does not say the word "bitch" one single solitary time. The second thing you could know is that it's a shitty Fast and Furious clone that still heroically manages to be over two hours long despite being fatally boring. Which is a disgrace, because together with Paul, the film has a formidable solid, including Imogen Poots, Dominic Cooper, future Oscar winner Rami Malek and Oscar nominee Michael Keaton (in the identical year he was nominated for the award). It was one other entry in a string of overlong action turds doled out by Disney, after John Carter and The Lone Ranger, however amazingly Need for Speed really did quite properly, which is something I won't ever perceive. At the least John Carter was in house.

13. Assassin’s Creed

Assassin’s Creed is a couple of guild of noble assassins and their centuries-lengthy battle towards the villainous Knights Templar. Each installment of the video recreation sequence takes place throughout a notable period of history, just like the Renaissance or Ancient Egypt, which is a big part of the franchise’s attraction. Who doesn’t want to do bitchin’ parkour stunts all through antiquity? Unfortunately, the Assassin’s Creed film suffers from the same mistake made by several video games within the collection, which is building the plot round modern-day humans basically sitting in giant VR chairs to transport themselves into the previous. The handful of awesome motion sequences set previously are constantly being interrupted by teleporting us to the longer term to watch Michael Fassbender flail round in his motion chair and then wander around a dull antiseptic facility gathering wooden exposition from the likes of Michael K. Williams and Marion "jet gas can’t melt steel beams" Cotillard. It’s a baffling storytelling gadget. Just set the movie up to now. Why do we want to maintain flashing forward to the future? It’s like randomly breaking up Gladiator each 20 minutes to point out Russell Crowe carrying an Oculus Rift and swinging his arms round in an web cafe.

12. Doom: Annihilation

Essentially the most stunning factor in regards to the latest direct-to-VOD movie Doom: Annihilation is that it isn’t terrible. It most actually just isn't good, and no one could ever accuse me of saying so, but it made extra of an effort to tie into the storyline of the games than the 2005 theatrical adaptation, and that counts for one thing. Amy Manson does an honest job of carrying the film as the leader of a staff of marines despatched to reclaim a analysis base from horde of invading demons. And the ending motion sequence, wherein Manson is transported to Literal Hell and has to do battle with what can best be described as Wizard Satan, is pretty obtained damn metallic. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie is type of sluggish, and the sets seem like something you would’ve seen on Star Trek: The subsequent Generation. It’s the Jaws 2 of video recreation movies - not the most effective the style has to supply, however positively not the worst.

11. Hitman

2007’s Hitman doesn’t have plenty of fans, however I'll watch something Timothy Olyphant does with a gigantic smile on my face, even if it’s Catch and Release or "stealing my automobile." And regardless that I assumed his casting in the film was a bit strange - the titular hitman, Agent 47, is a meticulous killer with a low, subtle accent who never loses his temper - I discovered it immensely satisfying as a barely cheesy motion/thriller. Olyphant definitely places his own spin on Agent 47, turning him into an irritable ball of simmering violence simply barely holding onto his composure, however it’s undeniably a fun efficiency, and he has some delightful exchanges with his co-star Olga Kurylenko. It looks like watching Olyphant full an prolonged set of missions in the sport, so if you’re a fan of either a part of that sentence, you’re going to get extra out of Hitman than most people.

10. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - The Cradle of Life

For the life of me, I can't remember what occurred within the sequel Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - The Cradle of Life versus what happened in the original, because they’re just about similar movies. Angelina Jolie returns as Croft, alongside Non-Swole Gerard Butler as a scoundrel named Terry whom she used to this point. There’s a good dynamic between the two that jogs my memory of movies like Out of Sight - they’re working collectively so effectively, however you know once they attain the treasure all bets are going to be off. On this installment, mentioned treasure is Pandora’s Box, which is speculated to include a world-ending plague. (Interestingly, a version of this idea is used within the 2018 reboot.) I definitely remember Ciarán Hinds getting kicked into mythological acid at the tip, so you must completely keep tuned for that. Speed director Jan de Bont does a reliable job filming all of the action, but as far as I’m concerned both Jolie Tomb Raiders are the same rattling film. Very Ok, super dated, and fun to look at with a bunch of friends so you'll be able to crack jokes at all of the appreciable early-aughts cheese.

9. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider is a franchise based round a character created to be a sex image for teenage boys, so it makes perfect sense that a movie adaptation launched in the yr of our lord 2001 would star Angelina Jolie and be directed by the man who made Con Air. Jolie stars as Lara Croft, an Indiana Jones analogue who raids tombs for his or her candy, candy riches. Co-starring within the movie are a pre-Bond Daniel Craig and the ghost of Jon Voight, who assist Lara find two items of an artifact that can control time. It’s aggressively Ok as an especially dated action movie, and appropriately is more attention-grabbing as an artifact of a forgotten era relatively than an precise film. But Lara Croft: Tomb Raider managed to do pretty properly, and is arguably the rationale Jolie became an international megastar. So… good job? It’s very dumb, but removed from the dumbest entry on this record.

8. Doom

When viewed through the lens of the year 2020, 2005’s Doom has a hell of a solid. Karl Urban, Oscar nominee Rosamund Pike, and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson in a supporting role as the villain? Why hasn’t this movie been elected president? Unfortunately, the reply is "because it’s type of boring." For some inexplicable motive, the lengthy-gestating adaptation decided to have almost nothing to do with the source materials, jettisoning the demonic hellgate storyline and replacing it with an incredibly lame alien mutation that offers good folks tremendous-strength and turns unhealthy folks into monsters, with tremendous-power. It may possibly in some way decide the content of your character however badly misunderstands what constitutes a punishment. Baffling plot apart, the movie’s "action" consists primarily of a group of disposable characters wandering by way of similar darkish hallways and sometimes capturing a zombie solely too many times. Bizarrely, 1997’s Event Horizon is a more faithful adaptation of Doom than the actual Doom movie. But this one has a strange charm, because of a handful of memorable quotes from Johnson and Urban and a couple of interesting motion scenes. Sadly Pike, as great as she is, isn’t given a lot to do.

7. Warcraft

Ultimately directed by Duncan Jones after spending 10 years in growth, Warcraft is one among only a handful of movies to gross over $four hundred million worldwide without cracking $a hundred million within the United States. One of the others is Terminator Genisys, which should give you a good suggestion of the sort of quality on the desk here. Warcraft, like Terminator 3 Part II, is an especially foolish film. It’s additionally a gorgeous fantasy film with some genuinely compelling characters among the Orcs. Unfortunately, the human characters are pretty wood, and the movie winds up being a two-hour prologue to a story we are going to in all probability by no means get to see, judging by the film’s poor domestic reception. Imagine if the opening to Fellowship of the Ring lasted for a hundred and twenty minutes after which we never got to see the remainder of Lord of the Rings, and that’s what Warcraft is. But it is an immensely watchable prologue, if nothing else.

6. The Resident Evil Series

I’m just going to depend your entire Resident Evil movie sequence as a single entry, as a result of they’re all basically the identical early 2000s action film. As an enormous fan of the video recreation collection, I've an advanced relationship with the movies - I respect their decision to make a completely new storyline, however all I actually want to see is a direct adaptation of the games in the principle series, because I really like a selected form of "dumb." They’re all completely high quality action horror films, however I constantly neglect how many there are and which movie is which, and i refuse to consider they all weren’t released within the 12 months 2003.