I've seen a great deal of video game movies, let me tell you that not one is very good, and ultimately just left me wishing I was playing the game instead.
Alone in the Dark - Uwe Boll, terrible acting, huge fucking plot holes, terrible effects, jack shit to do with the games.
BloodRayne - Uwe Boll, terrible acting, absolutely nothing to do with the games, decent gore effects though.
POSTAL - Uwe Boll, try hard trash that's so loosely connected together, terrible acting, everything that happens in this movie doesn't fucking matter, it's the definition of a waste of time. Go watch Hobo With a Shotgun instead.
DOOM - Absolute garbage, if you took the DOOM title away it would make zero difference. It has NOTHING to do with DOOM or DOOM 3, feels like a watered down Aliens or Event Horizon. Boring and cringy trash. Cept for The Rock. The Rock is always amazing. Even at his worst.
Prince of Persia - Saw it once, remember it having some elements of the game but overall it must be pretty unmemorable because I can't remember shit except they tried to get Jake Gyllenhaal, a Swedish white man, to play a Persian... really wtf m8.
Super Mario Bros. - Do I really have to say anything at all?
Mortal Kombat - Lack of gore, lack of violence, Christopher Lambert sounds like he ate a whole bag of cat litter, cringy dialogue... just a really boring fighting flick tbh. Also the CGI is laughably bad now.
Mortal Kombat Annihilation -
This. Fucking. Movie. Is one of the worst movies I've seen period. It might actually be so bad it's good. AWFUL acting, switched actors from the previous movie, AWFUL special effects, TERRIBLE dialogue between characters, TERRIBLE fight choreography... you'd swear Uwe Boll directed this one.
Double Dragon - Just a shitty cash in, I actually never finished it because when they showed the brothers standing in front of a Double Dragon arcade machine my mind was sent into a rage and I quit. Should you decide to watch this movie to the end
you have a lot to look forward to I'm sure. Resident Evil, all of them - How do these movies keep getting made? Why do people keep buying them? With each one they drift further and further away from the game's material. With such fantastic titles like "Retribution", "Afterlife", "Extinction" and "Apocalypse". The characters and dialogue is just so dry and the action sequences are cliche and kinda boring. I'm guessing it has to be a guilty pleasure to most.
Even James Cameron admitted that Silent Hill - Out of all the video game movie adaptions, this is probably the only one I got any enjoyment out of for being a decent film. I'm a fan of the SH series, and my SO is a die hard fan. I'm not sure what Team Silent thought about it, but from a fan's perspective it was I'd say 50% close to the series material and 50% its own thing. Still, I wouldn't call it a must watch, and some things like Pyramid Head just showing up makes zero god damn sense (he has to do with James' psyche from SH2, why the fuck is he here?!). They mentioned some things like the cult, and the transitions between worlds, all that jazz. So I'll give them props, out of ALL the VG films I've seen, this is probably #1 for best adaption.
Max Payne - Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis, Ludacris, terrible action sequences, some really wtf camera angles, unmemorable garbage. No good vibrations here.
Street Fighter - This was Raúl Juliá's last movie role and it stares the ever so great Jean-Claude Van Damme. More people get shot in this movie then there is actual fighting. Besides some characters from the second game, it has NOTHING TO DO WITH THE GAME AND JEAN-CLAUDE IS UNBEARABLY BAD IN THIS. His war speech near the end ranks up there with the most unintentionally hilarious and bad speeches I've ever heard.
Tomb Raider - It has been a very, very long time since I saw this, so I can't really comment on it. I remember nothing about it, so I don't know what that says for the film.
Wing Commander - Lets put Freddie Prinze Jr., a terrible actor, and Matthew Lillard, an annoying, cringy actor together. Also, lets make the Kilrathi look like giant stupid puppets. Fill it up with shit special effects, nails on chalkboard dialogue, and scifi cliches. Good job guys, you made me want to consider wrapping my lips around the barrel of a shotgun.
A few VG movies I haven't seen include Hitman and the new Warcraft movie. So I can't comment on those, all I can say is video games don't translate to film because they are two completely different mediums. In a movie, you are a spectator along for the ride. Everything is tightly sequenced exactly how the director wants it. You see what they want you to see exactly. Ever play a CoD SP game and feel like you were really overly restricted in what you can do and where you can go? Yeah, it doesn't work the other way around either. Most movie based games suck for that exact reason too. The flow, the conveyance to the player, the action. It's usually dull or just plain garbage.
Movies have a different progression than video games. Video games can go all over the place, movies are a straight line. Video games can be hours upon hours long, dropping story and action and suspense and progression and exploration all over the place in those hours. Movies have a beginning, a middle and an end and usually don't go past an hour and a half. How do you condense all of that into an hour and still make it good and feel loyal to the game?
Good games are designed to be worlds the player feels like they're actually in and can explore. In video games, the player sees what they want to see, in good games anyways. CoD's design for example makes it feel like the developer is not very confident. They force you to see everything that goes on in the fear that you'll miss it. You are not the player in a video game, you are an actor in an interactive movie. You go where the dev wants you to go, everything is based around an air tight design. You can't open doors, you can't go back, your squad mates don't move forward until you do, the enemy will keep spawning in until you move forward. It's fucking garbage design.
Take a game like GTA 5 or the new DOOM, the developer is confident that cool thing he spent time on will be seen by enough people. He doesn't care if someone misses it. That adds value to finding it and seeing it. That makes the world feel more alive. The design is based around the fact that so much is going on, there are side areas, side quests, hidden areas, random NPCs... all of these things factor in to what makes some games what they are. You can't show that in movies.
Also take into consideration that story in video games often plays out DURING gameplay, when the player is doing what they want in the game world. How do you translate that to a film? Already that will create a disconnect I think between fans of the game and the movie. They might see something familiar in a movie but have very different memories of that moment in the game. Or the game's aspects might be warped in the movie, or just plain wrong.
Then, as mentioned above, a LOT of games are actually inspired by multiple movies. Why make a Max Payne movie? I agree with andysheets1975, go watch Hard Boiled! Why make a DOOM movies? Go watch Evil Dead, Aliens and Event Horizon. Also mentioned before, but face it, most video game stories are nothing special or groundbreaking at all, and there is probably a movie out there that does it already. What is most important in a movie? The story. The plot. The characters and their dialogue. What is most important in a video game? The game design. The mechanics. The level of polish, The responsiveness of the controls, the "game feel". So, that's why you see some bizarre shit in some VG movies. The director is trying to make it interesting to the non-fans by adding things and taking things away and modifying things. In the end it just warps it into something else.
The greatest example of this is the Mario movie. Just look at that fucking abomination, well that's because Mario is as bare bones as you can get in a game. Though honestly I'd argue that's just reason to not make it into a movie in the first place. But guess what? Mario was the mutt's nuts. All those kids would surely flood the theaters to see it.
Honestly, most directors behind these movies know that the title alone will bring in a large number of fans, so that's already guaranteed money. These movies will bring in lots of non-fans too and for them it probably doesn't really matter. My mom loves horror movies, doesn't touch video games, and really liked the Silent Hill movie for instance. She doesn't understand why I think it's nothing special.