GetOut Magazine

Zombielike writing, acting 'Doom' video-game film
By CRAIG OUTHIER
Get Out

“Doom” is all too fitting a name for this feckless orgy of sci-fi bloodshed — it also describes the fate of any brain cell unlucky enough to stumble between its crosshairs.

Like many of the decade's most mentally impaired genre movies, this one started life as a popular “first-person shooter” video game. In a remote scientific research station on Mars, a top-secret genetics experiment has gone horribly awry, triggering the dreaded “level five breach.” (And we all know what a pain in the rear those can be.)

Using a teleportation portal helpfully left behind by a long-extinct race of superbeings, a team of roughneck Marines — led by a monosyllabic gym rat named Sarge (pro wrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) — rushes to the scene to investigate. Sarge is not one to back down from a lively afternoon of carnage. “Use extreme prejudice?” he asks, like an excited child on Christmas morning, upon receiving his marching orders.

What follows is a bloody yet unmoving spectacle of video game-style mayhem, as Sarge and the boys prowl a never-ending labyrinth of steel corridors, exterminating what appear to be stuntmen covered in burnt guacamole. Director Andrzej Bartkowiak — Hollywood's go-to guy for tawdry, profitable action movies (“Exit Wounds,” “Cradle 2 the Grave”) — plagiarizes the visual language of “Aliens” with none of the tension, restraint or humanity. Indeed, Sarge and his boys are a repellent lot, including a drug-pushing sex fiend and a religious fanatic who cartoonishly cuts his forearm with a bowie knife whenever he accidently uses the Lord's name in vain. Exasperated viewers will feel like performing similar acts of penitence.

This is the closest screenwriters Dave Callaham and Wesley Strick (“The Saint”) ever come to bona fide character development: One of the Marines (Karl Urban from “Lord of the Rings”) has a sister (Rosamund Pike from “Die Another Day”) who works in the research facility, and they have some sibling issues involving dead parents and such. Urban, though heroically stolid, doesn't have an emotive bone in his body, and Pike is less animated than most of the zombies Sarge and his men waste.

Even The Rock's anabolic-teddy-bear charisma is left largely untapped. Which leaves only one thing to say about “Doom”: Avoid with extreme prejudice.

‘Doom'
Starring: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike
Rating: R (strong violence/gore and
profanity)
Running time: 105 minutes
Playing: Opens Friday in Valley theaters
GRADE: D