If there is any one man who has garnered more hatred from gamers than Jack Thompson, it's Uwe Boll, the infamous director of video game movies. We all know that movies based on video games aren't exactly the most respected films in existence. Hell, I would go as far to say that with the exception of movies that tackle racism in the most overblown way humanly possible with all the subtlety of a fucking bulldozer and score Oscars by preying on liberal Hollywood's guilt, and movies whose titles begin with "The No" and end with "tebook", video game movies probably make up the worst genre of film in modern cinema. I thought about including a chapter in this book that was just a list of the ten worst video game movies ever made, but a quick Google search showed that I was beaten to the punch as that subject was done to death about five years ago. Considering the negative rap video game movies have and have had for years, we know going into a video game movie that it's more than likely going to suck.
Despite the fact that our expectations are immediately plummeted to rock bottom the moment we catch a whiff of the words, "based on the hit game," the video game adaptations brought to us by Uwe Boll draw such hateful, venomous responses from audiences that it appears rock bottom is a lofty goal that he could only hope to achieve. Before we get into just how hated and how villainous he is to the gaming subculture, let's get to know the man a little better.
This picture was probably not taken in Germany.
Uwe Boll was born in
The internet and gaming communities have had similar negative reactions to Dr. Boll's work. One angry viewer bought up the domain name Uweboll.com, which once linked to nothing but a blank white screen with the message, "please stop making movies." An online petition formed begging him to retire from working in film. At the time that I write this it has accumulated a little over 350,000 signatures. (Interestingly, he's agreed to retire if the petition reaches one million signatures.) His numerous vicious critics have made fun of the poor box office performance of his movies and the fact that they only turn a profit because of a loophole in German tax law that was designed to reward investment in German film. Also, based on the fact that he funds movies through his own company instead of through Hollywood studios, his critics have started a rumor that his movies are funded with Nazi gold, because apparently it's hilarious to imply that all Germans have deep personal ties with the Third Reich.
Ha!
That's some pretty intense hate to throw at a guy. The question I find myself asking is, what exactly is it that Uwe Boll is doing that's so wrong? Why does he deserve to be the most hated man among all gamers, and why are people actively conspiring to destroy his career? Although I'm posing these questions, let me be abundantly clear on this: I agree that his movies suck. They suck harder than the combined effort of an entire platoon of US Army specialists trained for years in the act of sucking. For the purposes of researching this chapter I watched all of his video game adaptations and felt IQ points seeping out of my ear and splattering on the floor, never to be regained again. They're so bad that the next time I'm receiving a root canal while the dentist blasts The Doors greatest hits (I fucking hate The Doors and their retarded lyrics and seven minute interludes that sound like elevator music) while a pyromaniac child burns my toes and melts my right big toenail and watches it seep down my foot and lower leg, giving me blisters all the way, I'll still smile and say "At least it isn't an Uwe Boll movie."
I'm including brief reviews of his video game adaptations to express this in more particular detail.
House of the Dead: With this feature Uwe Boll immediately has something in common with Oscar winning director Ron Howard. You might be really impressed with this until you realize that the thing they have in common is that they're about the only two fucking directors on Earth willing to cast Ron's brother Clint in multiple movies. I could explain how the editing that actually splices footage from the House of the Dead video game into the movie is dumb as fuck, the acting is laughable, the production values are awful, and the writing is retarded, but I think this excerpt of dialogue between the main character and the bad guy tells the story:
Rudy: You did all this to become immortal. Why?
Alone in the Dark: Fucking Tara Reid is cast as a scientist. Even the normally delusional Uwe Boll himself has expressed embarrassment at this casting choice. That's all you need to know. You may be thinking that The World is Not Enough made a similarly insulting decision to cast Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist. The only problem is that The World is Not Enough surrounded Denise Richards with Pierce Brosnan, who is surpassed by Sean Connery and Daniel Craig but is at least undeniably better than Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton, the great British actor Robbie Coltrane, Oscar winner Judi Dench, the absurdly hot Sophie Marceau, and John Cleese, one of the greatest comedians to ever grace the human race with his existence. Alone in the Dark surrounded Tara Reid with Christian Slater, star of The Wizard and 3000 Miles to Graceland, Stephen Dorff, the bad guy from Blade, and CGI monsters who, despite 19 years of cinematic technological advancement, still manage to look like complete and total shit next to the monsters from Aliens. Advantage: Bond.
Bloodrayne: This film about Rayne, a vampire woman who was a circus freak who broke out of her cage and now she fights bad vampires or something. It features much better actors than the previous two films listed (including Ben friggin' Kingsley), significantly better production values, and just an overall more technically competent film. Of course the writing is still terrible and the action is still incompetently staged, so instead of something hilariously awful like House and Alone, we get something that's just regular awful. His first two movies are two of the worst ever made, but they proved to be entertaining as hell for sheer Mystery Science Theater 3000‑type entertainment. Now he's just boring. Seeing as his whole career is built on making nothing out of something, it shouldn't come as a surprise that improving as a filmmaker actually makes his movies less watchable.
In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale: About any hope I had of developing an emotional connection to the main character played by Jason Statham (who is one of my favorite actors) was dashed about a minute into the movie when I saw that his character is a farmer and his name is Farmer. That kind of shit may have worked in There Will Be Blood when the protagonist who has a plain view of the world was named Daniel Plainview, but Uwe Boll isn't Paul‑Thomas Anderson, and as much as I love Jason Stathan, he ain't fucking Daniel Day‑Lewis. The movie itself features lots of battles in fields, tons of helicopter shots of people walking through the countryside, elfin woodland things, two kings on opposing sides, armies of black creatures that look exactly like orcs, a simple protagonist who becomes involved and plays a key role in the greater story, and the guy who played Gimli, but don't call it a Lord of the Rings ripoff. That would be completely ridiculous.
Postal: You might remember this as the movie that features a bunch of really tasteless jokes about 9/11 and couldn't find any theatrical distribution in this country. Uwe Boll went apeshit, screaming about how people can't handle his uncompromising creative vision, and called out popular American directors such as Eli Roth and
The movie that was too hot for American theaters contains such shockingly sophisticated material as graphic footage of a fat woman getting fucked, two 9/11 hijackers arguing about how many virgins they'll get after they die, Dave Foley's penis, Verne Troyer getting raped to death by a thousand monkeys, digs at Christianity, jokes about how George W. Bush is dumb (original!), and multiple Holocaust jokes. Uwe Boll's belief that this is the most shocking material ever made reminds me of that asshole you know who tells a joke that isn't particularly offensive and then goes, "You don't have to tell me I'm going to hell, I already know." Nobody was fucking going to tell you you're going to hell for saying that, you shit. Nobody is mortified that you joked that black people are poor and lazy. I'm not in awe of your fearless wit because you said the word "nigger" to a bunch of your white friends. Have you ever wondered if you're an asshole and you just don't know it? If you've ever said "You don't have to tell me I'm going to hell, I already know," at any point in your life, the answer is an emphatic fucking yes. Watching Postal and hearing Uwe Boll talk about it was like seeing every delusional would‑be comedian I've ever met all rolled into one and given $15 million to make a movie.
Uwe Boll's reaction to Postal not getting distribution is shockingly similar to how Carlos Mencia would react. Come to think of it, I've never seen the two of them in the same place...
On the plus side, as I researched this essay I found the Myspace of Zack Ward, who plays the main character in Postal, as well as the bully in A Christmas Story and the brother on Titus. I sent him a message saying I love nearly all of his non‑Uwe Boll work (I actually do), and based on his reply he seems like a very nice man.
Bloodrayne II: Deliverance: This sequel, taking place 100 years later and featuring Rayne (played by a new actress) in the Old West battling the undead gang of a vampiric Billy the Kid (Zack Ward again), did not manage to gain theatrical distribution and went direct‑to‑DVD. Much to my disappointment, this one didn't come with Boll screaming about how
Far Cry: Unfortunately, I didn't see this one because it came out between the time that I wrote this book chapter and right now as I'm reposting it on this blog, but based on the three reviews I read, it's an extremely generic 80's-style action movie complete with a macho lead guy, a female romantic interest that he shares no chemistry with, obnoxiously "wacky" comic relief supporting characters, Canadian woods that are somehow supposed to double for a tropical forest, and competent but not exactly thrilling action sequences. Uwe Boll continues the seemingly impossible task of his movies getting less entertaining the more technically competent he gets.
So I agree that Uwe Boll has no equal for the title of worst director working today. Every cinematic abortion he punishes audiences with is more putrid and menitent than the last. (When I was nine I invented the word "menitent," which means "having breath horrible enough to kill small animals." It never really caught on.) Still, I wonder why he's so passionately hated and why so many people (358,060 as I type this sentence) think he should be stripped of his right to work. If making bad movies is a crime,
This is Eli Roth as "The Bear Jew" in Inglorious Basterds. This acting role comprises the greatest contribution he's ever given American cinema. The contribution of the movies he actually wrote and directed ranks somewhere below an amateur porno my parents made in 1981.
And even though he's making such abominable cinematic exercises in diarrhea, he's not fooling anybody into paying money for something they thought would be really good. Uwe Boll's name is so notorious that anyone who pays money knows going into it exactly what they're getting. You really can't fault him for stealing well‑earned dollars from moviegoers who were expecting the most devastating social satire ever made and got Postal. Hell, as a publicity event to promote that particular film, Boll staged five boxing matches in which he fought some of his most brutal online critics. Any notion that he's fooling people into thinking his movies are great is thrown out the window when he builds an entire publicity event around the fact that people really, really hate his movies.
He kicked the shit out of all 5 opponents. Who knew a German could be so competitive?
If you want to go after some serious cinematic criminals who are truly guilty of stealing money from moviegoers who were expecting something else, go after the people responsible for the Jarhead trailer. The trailer portrays the film as a Gulf War version of Platoon or The Deer Hunter, in which constant slaughter, explosions, and killing in a foreign country smashes a man's psyche to bits. Literally every moment of the trailer is filled with either hilarious soldier hijinks or intense footage from battles. The actual movie has almost no action. Actually, the complete and total lack of action is the entire goddamn point of the movie. The movie is about a sniper on mop‑up duty after US airstrikes have already devastated the Iraqi army to the point that there's no one left to fight, and how being trained to kill and not actually getting to kill anyone, resulting in a tremendous amount of mental buildup with no release gives his killing instinct blue balls and destroys his mental state. It's a pretty good movie, but sure as hell not what audiences paid to see.
Similar jobs were pulled with the trailers for About Schmidt and Grosse Pointe Blank, which portrayed those movies as wacky fast‑paced comedies when they were really grim, dark, deliberately paced films with only a few choice comedic moments. And don't even get me started on Say It Isn't So, the 2001 incest‑themed comedy that was advertised as being "from the guys who brought you There's Something About Mary." Thinking that it would be another hilarious comedy written and directed by the Farrelly Brothers, you actually got a piece of shit that they only produced, with the director being the guy who was the first assistant director of Beverly Hills Ninja who was making his lead directing debut, while it was written by two guys with no film writing credits to their name.
Although to be fair, when all the poster has to offer is Heather Graham in a short dress and a lame vagina reference, people should have assumed something was up.
Surely these are all far greater sins than anything Uwe Boll has ever done. So what is he doing that's so evil? Maybe it's because he's destroying the names of popular video game series by adapting them into bad movies. Yeah, I'm sure that's it. As a matter of fact, in reading posts about him on video game message boards, he's almost always criticized for not being true to the source material. After all, very little of House of the Dead takes place in a house, the Bloodrayne movies take place a couple hundred years before the games do, the main character in Postal never actually goes postal like his video game counterpart and does nearly all of his killing out of self‑defense, and as far as I can tell the Dungeon Siege and Alone in the Dark movies don't have a goddamn thing to do with the games with which they share a name.
I really hope that isn't why some people hate him and want him to stop making movies. As far as I'm concerned that's a terrible reason. I agree he's hurting the reputation of these series of games, but they hardly represent the pinnacle of video game achievement, and they aren't the types of games we hoist upon our shoulders and display as astounding achievements that prove once and for all that video gaming is an art form and Roger Ebert is a douche for saying otherwise. Allow me to go back into list form and take a closer look at the game series that Uwe Boll is allegedly destroying to make my point a little more clear.
House of the Dead: Odds are you've played at least one of these games before. More than likely you popped in a couple quarters at the HotD machine at the mall arcade, ran out of lives about halfway through the first level, and never played it again. The home versions of these games are similarly minor diversions as they only take about an hour to beat. The games are known as much for being fun shooting games as they are for some of the most hilariously poorly acted cutscenes in video game history. It was neck‑and‑neck with the Resident Evil series for a while until RE finally stepped its game up and actually tried to tell better stories, yielding the honor to HotD. Apparently, Uwe Boll is a bastard for hurting the reputation of a game I once played for ten minutes because I was bored and waiting for my girlfriend to get done at
Alone in the Dark: The original trilogy of this game began in 1992 and finished in 1994, and has a slight amount of importance in video game history as it's officially credited with inventing the 3D survival horror genre of games. After the third game the series was dormant for seven years until the 2001 release of Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare for computer, PS2, and Dreamcast. The game was quickly dismissed and forgotten as a mediocre Resident Evil ripoff. Most recently a fifth game was released in 2008, which has received largely negative reviews and upset longtime fans of the series as your character is very rarely alone or in the dark. The movie version sucked, but it only sullied the name of a game series that hadn't been relevant in well over a decade, and the most recent game in the actual series was as far off from the content of the original as Dr. Boll's masterpiece.
This is a screenshot from the newest Alone in the Dark. Call me crazy, but I have a feeling driving outdoors on a well-lit street isn't quite consistent with the intended spirit of something called Alone in the Motherfucking Dark.
Bloodrayne: It's Blade with a chick. That's all you need to know. Oh, you want more? Okay, well, aside from being the exact same character as Blade only female and hot, instead of seeking to eradicate the vampire race like Blade, she feasts on the blood of Nazis. Damn you Uwe Boll, you made a video game series about a large‑breasted vampire woman who drinks the blood of Nazis look silly. Shit, I mean at least he brought an Oscar winner to the table.
Apparently people are pissed that Uwe Boll didn't give this material its proper due. Yeah.....
Dungeon Siege: This actually is a pretty well‑respected series of games whose newest installment came out as recently as 2005, but the movie adaptation came out at the point that Uwe Boll was no longer hilarious‑bad and was simply just bad‑bad. A movie simply being dull, interesting, and too long isn't going to have the same reputation destroying effect that an offensively terrible movie could have. I'm glad to report that the Dungeon Siege games with all of their endless hacking and slashing will survive Uwe Boll unharmed.
Postal: Some people say that Postal the movie doesn't live up the main spirit of Postal the game. They say that in the game the character is a guy who snaps and goes on a rampage, killing everyone in sight while in the movie the character is a guy who gets framed for a bunch of crimes and runs afoul of some bad guys and has to kill the villains and crazed townspeople out of self‑defense, and him still being completely sane by the end of the movie goes against the idea of the game. I say that Postal is a bad game that could only gain attention by intentionally courting the inevitable controversy that will come with forcing you to slaughter hundreds of civilians, while Postal is also a bad movie that could only gain attention by intentionally courting the inevitable controversy that will come with making a whole bunch of deliberately tasteless 9/11 jokes. In that sense they're a perfect match.
Do not adjust your monitor. This is an accurate screenshot displaying how in Postal 2 you can shove a gun barrel up a cat's ass and use the cat as a silencer. When you find yourself defending a game where you shove a gun barrel up a cat's ass, do you ever stop and wonder, "Why am I doing this?"
As you can see, these aren't exactly the types of definitive games that changed the world. I take way bigger issue with the people who turned culturally important games such as Super Mario Brothers, Street Fighter, Doom, Wing Commander, and Resident Evil into cinematic urine‑soaked towels than Uwe Boll for hurting the good names of disposable arcade shooters, irrelevant PC games, and big‑breasted vampire chicks.
Also, I don't think there's much need to worry about him getting his hands on a really good game series that actually has potential to make a great movie. The people who own the movie rights to these games know they have something potentially special on their hands, and they're not going to pass it off to Boll anytime soon. Despite rumors surfacing at different times that he was set to direct or looking to direct film adaptations of Halo, Metal Gear Solid, and World of Warcraft, the right people have wisely kept him away. 20th Century Fox has kept Boll off the shortlist of potential directors for the upcoming Halo movie, Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima has stated in his blog in response to rumors that Boll was looking to direct the MGS movie and was given a script to read, "Absolutely not! I don't know why Uwe Boll is even talking about this kind of thing. We've never talked to him. It's impossible that we'd ever do a movie with him." Finally, when Uwe Boll recounted a story about his attempt to acquire the rights to make a World of Warcraft movie, he said, "I got in contact with Paul Sams of Blizzard, and he said, 'We will not sell the movie rights, not to you... especially not to you.'"
Long story short, the people who own important series that deserve a good movie are doing the right thing with their property and waiting until a good offer comes along. To be honest, other then the fact that Bloodrayne probably destroyed the gorgeous Kristanna Loken's shot at being a big star, the actual damage he's done seems to fall somewhere between non‑existent and minimal. I will admit that the man is an asshole. He's an arrogant, delusional, ignorant, obnoxious, moronic, completely intolerable shit. At the Postal boxing event he honest‑to‑goodness kicked the shit out of five contenders who were expecting a painless publicity event, he honestly believes in all stereotypes about Asian women being bad drivers, and in his classiest move of all, he makes fun of Owen Wilson's suicide attempt on the commentary track of the Postal DVD.
However, while he's an unbelievable asshole, he's also an incredibly entertaining one. His insane ranting, impotent scuffles with more powerful and likable Hollywood figures, his delusion, his bluster, his bigotry, his insistence that most people love his movies and his critics are just a tiny and vocal number, and everything he does to make the world just a little more insane makes him a complete joy to watch. On top of that, for all of his detestable qualities, he's surprisingly charming and funny in interviews and public appearances. I don't like that he's an asshole and pissing people off that he personally encounters, but sometimes that's the price you have to pay for an entertaining public figure. If the price for seeing Barry Bonds and Albert Belle hit tons of home runs is them being jerks and making their 25 teammates hate their lives, that's a price I'm willing to make them pay. If Eddie Murphy being a dick and pissing off entire movie sets is what it takes for me to see him don a fat suit and fart, so be it. Uwe Boll is not a very respectable man, but he always commands my attention and he always makes me smile.
So for these reasons I ask all of you not to sign the petition. I don't want it to hit a million signatures. I never want Uwe Boll to go away. He isn't hurting video games, he isn't harming anyone, and the worlds of video games and movies will never be the same without him. Let him box as many of his critics as he wants, let him make more insane paranoid rants about how he's a great artist who's being screwed over by jealous rivals, and let him pump out terrible movies to his heart's content. We've always had terrible video game movies. For over a decade before Boll made his first appearance we've endured depressingly awful live‑action adaptations of games, but this is the first time the whole process has been any fun. To the critics of Uwe Boll, just enjoy the show and don't take the man so seriously. His movies are terrible, but they're really not much worse than 1993's Super Mario Brothers starring John Leguizamo or 1994's Street Fighter starring Jean‑Claude Van Damme. And to the man himself, keep up the bad work. I've never seen a man have so much fun reveling in public infamy, and I salute you. Ich liebe dich, Uwe Boll.
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