“Who dies next? I’ve got a fiver on myself.” Priests never did learn how to bet.
Mutant Chronicles (2008), it turns out, is based on a video game, and that explains the dystopian scenario: the world is controlled by four warring corporations (remember the old board game RISK?), which accidentally break a seal during a corporate war that had been restraining an ancient evil. It specializes in converting the sick, injured, and the dead into multi-use zombies.
Sort of a recycling program.
So everyone who can find a ticket onto the spaceships is evacuating Earth, while the leftovers will have to fend for themselves, or join up for that last, suicidal mission to Hell.
Yeah, sounds like a video game.
What sort of saves this movie is the acting and the script, who and which manages to wrench some credible emotion out of a scenario that doesn’t really lend itself to emotion. The script digs around and finds some sad situations that actually feel authentic, mostly involving children, and the characters make it work.
Which is not to say you need to rush right to your favorite movie source to see this. It’s gritty, quite violent, a little silly, and there’s too many throw away characters. But the visuals are generally spectacular, even if Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t agree – maybe it looked worse on the big screen – there’s an actual plot, and if the ending is somewhat ambiguous, what the hey – it’s all in a good corporate cause.
Right?
