Doom, starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as Sarge and Karl Urban as John Grimm, promises very little from the onset -- and keeps its promise. The first 10 minutes involve monsters chasing down hapless civilians, soldiers wielding comically oversized guns and light glistening off of The Rock's shirtless back. This blueprint for space station mayhem plods along a highly predictable route, accentuated only by Mars-sized plot holes and undistinguishable stock characters like the nerdy scientist and the rookie.
What differentiates this movie from a cookie-cutter action horror flick is that Doom tries to do far too many things and succeeds at none. The concept of a videogame adaptation starring a wrestling superstar already has so many different demographics to satisfy; in order to appease the sci-fi, horror, Half-Life and WWF crowds, Doom throws all of the genres into a mishmash, ending up a cliched crossbreed of Alien and Dawn of the Dead, but not as good as either. Despite the smart quips of The Rock, which thankfully never become stale, the movie falls flat from the start and never really gets up.
