Review: Mutant Chronicles (2008)

[Tim Voon]

Film Review - Mutant Chronicles 2008
By Tim Voon
2 out of 5 stars

On occasion I do like to borrow a mindless movie about zombies/mutants
who wreak death and destruction on the world, and I got exactly what I
asked for - the mindless bit.

The year is somewhere in the future, on some distant planet where a
mysterious machine hidden beneath the earth is converting the dead and
dying into killer zombies. Throw into this kung fu, a mysterious cult
that believes in a saviour who will come and save humanity by
destroying the machine and John Malkovich and you will get a strange
brew of zombie bodies.

Did I really understand what was going on? Not really. Did it really
matter, not really - it is after all a mutant zombie movie and things
don't really have to make sense as long as the body count keeps
mounting. The surrounds of this science fiction world is computer
generated, similar to what was seen in SIN CITY and THE SPIRIT.
However the quality of the CGU is inferior and the artificial look is
detrimental to the quality of the movie. There is plenty of gore as
expected, bodies being pierced by sharp objects, heads being
decapitated. In fact the only moments of bright colour comes from the
bountiful splashes of blood thrown on screen. Otherwise, everything
else is a haze of greys.

The movie begins in the trenches of a fierce battle. The first
impression is that one is in the trenches of the western front of the
first world war. Before long we have zombies amassing the field
slaughtering men like chickens at a processing plant. Confused? I was.
Then the movie flips to the near future and we have fighter monks (Ron
Perlman) recruiting battled hardened soldiers (Thomas Jane) to fulfil
a prophecy about saving humanity by destroying the zombie mutant
machine. John Malkovich has a brief moment citing some lines before he
is quickly killed off by the mutants.

I think this movie fails not just in the CGU quality department but
also in the storyline and tension department. I realised somewhere in
the middle of the movie after a few hundred thousand people had been
wiped out by this plague that I wasn't feeling any excitement or
worry. I was on edge of my seat in the first 5 minutes of 28 DAYS
LATER, which is a gold standard for zombie movies in my book. In fact
I was busy looking at the clock and ended up reading the paper as
innocent people were being slaughtered.

Somewhere in the middle of the religions mumbo jumbo and kung fu
fighting, and Thomas Jane being converted into a half mutant my
interested picked up towards the end. At least there was a
satisfactory explanation to the chaos, but I realised had gone through
90 minutes of horror without feeling any tension or fright for that
matter. Fail.

www.filmnet.com
winklebeck at hotmail.com