As far as cashing in on preexisting IP goes, Sonic makes a “Sure, we can keep doing this!” case for game-to-screen money grabs - and that’s pretty okay! It looks great (thanks to that revised CGI), is funnier than it needs to be, has a joyful cast that embraces the absurdity of it all, and turned out to be a pretty moving little tale of friendship and chosen family. The fun police tried pouring water on this one after the debacle of the first trailer, which featured Sonic looking like a small human boy who’d been cursed by a witch, but this iconic Sega property turned out to be a delightful little adventure for the whole family. It’s got the right amount of topical humor, the right amount of silliness, the right amount of heart, the right amount of over-the-top Jim Carrey, and the right amount of James Marsden, by which we mean James Marsden is in almost every scene.
Crows zero netflix movie#
It turns out that Sonic the Hedgehog is a movie that’s just the right amount of a lot of good things. It’s less a film than it is big-screen video-game performance art. The score is by Alan Silvestri and the movie stars Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, Dennis Hopper, Fisher Stevens, and Fiona Shaw, with Samantha Mathis as Princess Daisy. If Terry Gilliam had directed a video-game movie, this would be it. The original video-game movie, featuring arguably the most recognizable video-game characters ever, Super Mario Bros., benefits from being just so unabashedly weird. If you grew up either kicking ass or just button mashing your way through Kombat on Super Nintendo, seeing Scorpion and Sub-Zero and Goro come to life onscreen was thrilling, and it turns out that Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa was born to say “Flawless victory.” Though it sounds a bit like a backhanded compliment, Kombat is the gold standard of video-game movies. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.
It might not be the first video-game movie, but Mortal Kombat is the apex of the form, because the premise is almost impossible to screw up if you just go all in: A bunch of fighters convene in an otherworldly location and battle for the fate of the world. Our regrets to any staunch defenders of those two titles. First, some explanation: Entries had to be live action, meaning no Angry Birds, and while BloodRayne is on this list, BloodRayne: Deliverance and BloodRayne: The Third Reich had little to do with the source material, so they were left out of the rankings. So here’s every video-game movie ranked according to its place in the video-game movie canon, starting with the reasonably palatable and working down to the most absolutely unwatchable. Street Fighter is always going to suffer in comparison to, say, Die Hard, but if you look at it in the context of similar movies, it starts to looks pretty impressive. In the 27 years since the release of the first video-game movie, Super Mario Bros., there has never been, critically speaking, a good entry in the genre - until now! The Sega game turned big-screen action movie Sonic the Hedgehog has edged out a positive critical consensus and even reintroduced the singular physical comedy stylings of Jim Carrey after a long Serious Film hiatus.īut let’s be real, B-movie status is typically the absolute ceiling on these kinds of products, and it’s clearly time to stop judging video-game movies the way we judge other movies, and instead start weighing them exclusively against their peers.
It’s like playing a carnival game called “Face Punches” and demanding your money back because you got punched in the face.
Here’s the thing: If you see a movie based on a video game and expect it to be objectively good, then you’re the only one to blame for your disappointment. This article was originally published in 2016 and has been updated to include recent releases, including this month’s Sonic the Hedgehog. Photo-Illustration: Maya Robinson/Vulture
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