Doom (2005)

It's bad, but not cruel & unusual punishment like Ever After and certainly far from "Van Helsing bad". If you willingly walk into traffic, you'll likely get it - just like the chicken. Five minutes into the exposition & about 30 seconds into live-action dialogue, the showman known as The Rock (in his perpetually brawny, pubescent-camp routine) calls rank amongst his marines & describes their imminent mission as "a game". So, the entire movie is low-brow voyeurism and eye-candy for would-be gamers. The film thrives in clichés but occasionally commits cardinal sins in movie screenwriting, such as when a character states ominously, "there's something in Dr. K's office" instead of actually generating that tension visually or with use of sound. Alexander MacKendrick would call this the “Look, Highland sheep!” slip up.

Doom is a shoot-em-up CG show that’s occasionally fun for the violence-desensitized youth, 40 & under. On the non-CG side, Rosamund Pike of Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice appears as a pretty face in poor imitation American accent. On the other hand, Karl Urban portrayed a character who looked like the moral center of the film that didn’t have a chance to materialize in the face of big monster-blasting guns. It's all quite unpretentiously phallic.