2016 has been a banner year for video game movies actually coming out, with "Warcraft,""Angry Birds" and "Ratchet & Clank" all hitting their release dates. "Assassin's Creed" is coming out in December, too, and looks like it could actually be not-horrible!
Still, video game movies in general have a less than sterling reputation, and there's a reason for that. Aside from a scant few that are watchably mediocre, the majority of them are garbage. Here's a celebration of the history of video games movies in the hope that their future is much brighter:
SEE ALSO: 14 of the best games that never came out
"Mortal Kombat: Annihilation" (1997)
For all its extreme martial arts cheese, 1995's "Mortal Kombat" is probably one of the better video game movies. It takes itself as seriously as the games (not at all) and its cast members are all basically recognizable as the characters they portray. It's goofy fun.
Its sequel came out two years later and dashed any goodwill the people may have had for the fledgling film series. "Mortal Kombat: Annihilation" is a boring, low-budget mess with excruciatingly bad acting and special effects straight out of "Sharknado."
Seriously, the entire thing is a sub-SyFy-level mess of a production. It's incredible this movie was allowed to be released in theaters.
"Max Payne" (2008)
The "Max Payne" series was a bit revelatory in the world of video games for combining a film noir detective aesthetic with "The Matrix"-esque "bullet time" combat sequences. It was more hard-nosed and gritty than most video games in 2001, for sure.
The 2008 film adaptation starring Mark Wahlberg doesn't get a single part of it right. Its use of color is meant to evoke classic film noir, but it just looks bleak and washed out. It also tries to simulate the game's combat by just setting every action scene in painfully dull slow motion.
Most importantly, its cast just isn't up to the task. Wahlberg spends most of the movie whispering and staring as Max, while Ludacris (who I love to death) is woefully out of place as the grizzled police lieutenant. Mila Kunis, as love interest Mona Sax, has very little to do.
"Max Payne" is far from unwatchable, but instead of feeling like a faithful, interesting adaptation of a video game, it just feels like a hollow imitator of much better detective movies.
"Super Mario Bros." (1993)
As the first major motion picture based on a video game, "Super Mario Bros." set the precedent for all of them being trash.
Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo (neither of whom are especially Italian) star as Mario and Luigi, two plumbers living in Brooklyn. They get transported to an alternate universe version of Manhattan where humans evolved from dinosaurs instead of primates, which is a dystopian world led by Bowser, played by Dennis Hopper.
If that sounds terrible and not at all evocative of the video games, that's because it is and it isn't, respectively. Seeing two guys whose only resemblance to Mario and Luigi is the colors they wear galavant around a nightmare version of Manhattan didn't do a lot for kids in 1993, as the movie was a box office bomb.
Here's a secret: I kind of love"Super Mario Bros." It's a bizarre nightmare of a movie, but I don't envy anyone who had to play the old video games and write a movie script based on that. It's a trashy piece of cinema, but one that's fun to see.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider