Release Date: January 28, 2005
Starring: Christian Slater, Tara Reid, Stephen Dorff, Mathew Walker
Directed by: Uwe Boll
Written by: Elan Mastai, Michael Roesch, Peter Scheerer
Distributed by: Lions Gate Films
MPAA Rating: R (violence, language)
Alone in the Dark is a cheap, badly produced adaptation of the video game of the same name, which is itself a highly derivative entry into the paranormal action/suspense genre in which government agents hunt carnivorous aliens because the creatures will annihilate humanity if left to their own devices.
Directed by Uwe Boll (House of the Dead) with a scatterbrained zeal heavily infused with the sensibility of industrial rock, it is less a coherent motion picture than a series of fight scenes and shootouts that feature abysmally unconvincing special effects.
The film stars Christian Slater as Vincent Carnby, a former member of the government agency in charge of tracking down the monsters. Slater’s second-tier status and Carnby’s perpetual five o’clock shadow coalesce perfectly with the movie’s B-grade luster.
In fact the presence of Tara Reid -- who is staggeringly awful as Aline Cedrac, an assistant museum curator (the creatures have something to do with an ancient civilization) and Carnby’s love interest -- suggests that the movie would be quite happy to wallow in self-parody, but it regrettably never goes far enough in that direction.
Instead it remains futilely serious, developing a stale rivalry between Carnby and a current government agent named Richards (Stephen Dorff, who wishes he was Peter Sarsgaard) that is resolved when Carnby saves Richards’s life by shooting a monster that was about to eat Richards. The scene’s execution is so hackneyed and unsubtle -- Carnby calmly blows the creature away, whereupon the two men lock eyes in a steely stare that says: “I may not like you, but now I know I can trust you” -- that it would be howlingly bad if the rest of the movie weren’t equally dreadful.
It runs a little over 90 minutes, which is far too long for the little story it has to skate by on (this includes an almost irrelevant subplot in which Aline’s boss, played by Mathew Walker, turns out to be aiding the creatures). Usually these kinds of movies aren’t much for narrative, anyway, but in other game-to-screen adaptations (the Resident Evil franchise, for example), the special effects are at least passable.
Alone in the Dark is also sorely in need of a strong screen presence at its center; Slater’s is almost nil. A bigger (literally as well as figuratively) actor, like Vin Diesel or even The Rock, would have helped this movie immeasurably.
But even if everything went right in this film, it would still be mediocre at best, because it borrows so much in content from so many other movies: The X Files, the Alien franchise, Ghostbusters, The Relic, The Faculty, and, yes, even the Resident Evil movies are part of the mix. Fans of other genre entries will surely notice additional sources as well.
I have never played the Alone in the Dark video game, so I cannot say whether this is a proficient adaptation. That almost doesn’t matter, though, because the movie’s only possible target audience is those who have played it; I can’t, in good conscience, recommend this movie to anyone else.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)