Enjoyable

Rating: 9/10 (14 November 2006)

Very impressed, I'm not sure why some people are panning it so hard. While a few of the visual cues are slightly awkward, this stands alone as a film, rather than the typical 'film of a game' rubbish we normally get fed. There's nothing terribly difficult to understand here - surely everyone is familiar with parallel/spirit world concepts by now? The dialogue is fairly basic in places, but certainly not bad. We're not in Uwe Boll territory here, not by a country mile.
So, I like it as a film, but it does score even better as a film adaption of a game. The subject matter has been pretty carefully used I thought, enough changes for it to be coherent, the effects are great, and I particularly like the way they used audio from the games, including the theme tunes. The general look of the film captures the general look of the games perfectly. The one weak link I found was the casting of Sean Bean. He's an excellent actor, but seemed simply mis-cast. His character in this film is fairly helpless, and would have been played better by someone a little younger, and less world weary. No doubt he was included to give the film some star factor.