So close...

Rating: 6/10 (21 March 2008)

One day a video game adaptation will quietly roll onto our cinema screens with an engaging story and strong characters, with enough franchise references to keep the fans happy, and enough depth to satisfy the discerning movie-goer. This will, of course, be the day winged pigs descend from the heavens.
So until fiction-past-never o'clock, we have Silent Hill. Make no mistake, this IS the best mainstream video game adaptation so far... but that's like comparing X Factor winners at The Magic Flute.
Imagine, if you will, someone grabbing and shaking the Silent Hill franchise until the violence fell out. Throw in the Unseen Bean, an obtuse young girl and a narrative structured on the tedious "go to point A, collect object Y" busywork of the game itself and you have the makings of a film that looks nice but is fundamentally broken.
That's not to say there're no enjoyable moments - Pyramid head flaying some useless rambling bint is always good for a chuckle - but let down by a plot that is almost entirely nonsense (incidentally told via a ten-minute flashback sequence at the end) and the utterly inexplicable attempts to justify the aesthetics with incomprehensible backstory.
People make this mistake of comparing video game adaptations with other video game adaptations.
Quit it.
Because when you compare anything to Super Mario Bros it's bound to come up smelling of roses.
Watch Jacobs Ladder instead.