Alone In The Dark - Film Only (Alone In The Dark (DVD))

Member Name: DavidJay

Product:	Alone In The Dark (DVD)
Date:	20/01/09 (32 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well, it got some CGI things a job that've been on the dole since 1995

Disadvantages: It's Alone In The Dark by Uwe Boll.

Another Uwe Boll video game adaptation, Alone In The Dark - or, The Relic, as it would no doubt be known if The Relic hadn't had the audacity to show up first - is, much like any Boll picture you care to mention, an hour and a half tug of war between vast stretches of almost unbearable tedium and short bursts of truly insane, inconsistent, confusing, illogical digi-action that often feel like sequences too poorly to perform in other, better action pictures, sequences that have come crawling to Boll's feet to die.

The opening chase business, for example, wherein Christian Slater in a taxi is chased by Someone Else for a time before the pair of them bound out their vehicles and go jumping about the surrounding buildings, seems very much like something that probably tried out for The Bourne Identity, but got turned down owing to the gammy leg - here it comes limping to Boll, for Boll is a man who will never turn down any limping, chocking, coughing action sequence that wants to fill ten minutes of screen time, no matter HOW unfit it clearly is for the job. Come on then, says Boll, and there iti s, cluttering up the first ten minutes of Alone In The Dark and probably will, we can assume, clutter up the last hour of Crazy Taxi - The Movie, or Ridge Racer - The Movie soon as Boll gets around to hearing tell of them.

The remainder of the picture involves a lot of walking about in the dark (not alone - In The Dark With Half An Army Plus Stephen Dorff would've been a more fitting title) and some squinting at computer screens and something to do with a museum and a Relic of some sort and a bunch of CGI monsters glitching about the corridors.

Much fun can be gleamed from an unveiling of the REAL plot, which is this - Act 1 - Christian Slater, somewhat confused, somewhat uncertain as to what he's doing here, runs about a bit and then comes into contact with Tara Reid, who seems similarly confused.

Act 2 - Tara Reid and Christian Slater slowly come to the horrific truth - We're in Alone In The Dark by Uwe Boll. It's not that Uwe Boll makes bad pictures, they're probably thinking, that worries me so much about this. So what if a man makes bad pictures? He's also an obnoxious racist misogynist boor who, really, honest to God, we shouldn't be having much to do with at all, to be honest. And I doubt he knows why the screen is goin all pixellated like this every half hour or so when someone grabs a gun or needs to run away from something.

Act 3 - Tara Reid and Christian Slater try their damndest to escape Alone In The Dark. They run around tunnels, they holler at every doorway, they holler to the audience. There must be a way out of here, they scream. Stephen Dorff acts like Stephen Dorff, which isn't all that bad at all. Something about an explosion happens.

There are many things to be said about why, I suppose, if you get down to it, it's actually kinda nice that pictures such as those hocked up of a morning by Uwe Boll exist. This isn't the place to say it, for Alone In The Dark is just a relentlessly boring piece of crap, and not, say, a relentlessly insane piece of crap that's still, kind of, it's in own way, genius, like House Of The Dead. Nor is it a disgusting, offensive, truly abhorrent piece of crap, like Postal, or Boll VS The Critics, The Asians, The Muslims And Others as it will be known from here on in.

Alone In The Dark - maybe it refers to us, who, about 45 minutes in, bored halfway towards the Bronze Age, are gifted with Revelation - the Revelation that oh, my God, we ARE alone, in the Dark, and Alone In The Dark is playing right in front of the things we can see Alone In The Dark with.

For us, like Slater, like Reid, there is no escape.

Summary: A supremely boring nonsense of a thing - For masochists only.