Movie Review - The Mutant Chronicles

For a film thats listed on Wikipedia as "released in an unfinished form" this is pretty good. Take bits of Silent Hill, Quake 4, The Trench and other various weird and wonderful sci-fi, horror and fantasy films and you get The Mutant Chronicles.

I personally haven't heard of the Role Playing Game this is based on (because I'm not that much of a nerd) but fans of Silent Hill and Quake 4 will all be crying that this has mercilessly ripped off their ideas. Which is completely wrong as the original RPG was written way back in 1993 predating Quake 4 by 12 years and Silent Hill by 6 years so it appears the plot of this game has proved to be very influential indeed.

Thomas Jane is your heroic lead as Mitch Hunter (it's not worth talking about his military rank because it's constantly referred to as different ranks by different characters as they speak to or about him and thats this films first, worst and biggest goof). Exactly why Thomas Jane got this job is hard to know as this is only really his 3rd big movie having previously starred in The Mist (and we had no clue why he was the star in that either), The Punisher (the incredibly weak remake that made Dolph Lungren's version look good) and Deep Blue Sea so he's hardly what you call star material. I assume they cast him because he looked good in the costume and gave off a suitably pretty vibe to the women in the room.

If we're honest John Malkovich is the biggest star in the movie but he's not in it for long (a lot like Sean Pertwee who only appears at the start and end of the film, I felt his character was a complete waste of time) which really makes Ron Perlman (playing religious cleric Brother Samuel) the biggest star in the film but he plays his role like he's only turning up for the wage packet which should really make the producers of Hellboy pretty nervous about getting a 3rd film out of their franchise.

The lesser known members of the cast are the real stars here, people like Devon Aoki as Valerie Duval (probably better known for her role in Sin City and I'm really pleased to see her get a decent well rounded role like this) are the ones who truly shine in roles that don't get much dialogue but the performers really make the most of their characters.

Set in some far flung future after an Ice Age a spaceship lands on Earth and starts turning humans into Mutants using a machine that utilizes dead and dying human bodies as source material. A group of soldiers from all the largest surviving groups manage to seal the spaceship underground effectively ending the mutant threat.

That is until there is global civil war between the various human factions (Fans of Ion Storms Daikatana will think they stole the name Mishima for Asia but the RPG predates the game by 4 years) breaks the seal on the door containing the mutant making spaceship and the nasty
mutants are released once more onto an unsuspecting Earth.

The civil war scenes look like a cross between World War 1 (right down to the Allied and German looking costumes and some equipment) and some sort of Steampunk inspired nightmare although the mutants themselves do look as though they were lifted right off the set of Silent Hill or from the Strogg sections of Quake 4.

The clerics lead by Brother Samuel decide their only hope for survival is a suicide mission to plant a long forgotten bomb back into the machine in hopes of stopping production of any further mutants and the chosen group of disgruntled killers is sent off to find a way down to
the machine to plant the bomb.

Obviously various members of the group get killed along the way, I won't say who or when as it's more fun to try and guess who is going to get killed next and how. The ending is fairly ambiguous, it does have a resolution of sorts but it left me feeling like they'd cut at least 30
minutes of material to get to the end titles quickly.

I did enjoy the film but it felt like it hadn't been resolved completely at the end, if this was due to the fact they say the film is unfinished then that's understandable. If it was because they were hoping to get a sequel its also a fairly justified reason.