Silent Hill: Revelation (*1/2 out of ****)

I retain the notion that Silent Hill is the best movie based directly off a video game movie to date. That's not really a great title since the majority of video game movies are woeful. Silent Hill is a decent movie with a great movie hidden underneath all the silliness. Those great moments will never be made whole and thus the film will never be all that it could've been. So here a few years too late is a sequel that had the chance to fix the mistakes of the first one. In adapting a video game get rid of the feel of a video game and capture the themes that were presented in the original medium. Silent Hill at points fantastically captured the intended dreadful atmosphere. All the sequel had to do was keep the atmosphere but make the movie feel like what it was... a movie. Silent Hill: Revelation went the other way and made some instances of the film even more video game like. It is a massive disappointment to the source material.

Taking plot elements from the third Silent Hill game this film follows Heather (Adelaide Clemens). She and her father (Sean Bean) are running from an evil order that want Heather to come to Silent Hill for sinister purposes (being able to stop the darkness and what not). This order kidnaps Heather's father and she must go to Silent Hill to rescue him.  Up until the film actually gets to the town is nearly unwatchable. Characters behave oddly, the horror scenes are painful and the pacing is all over the place.  I don't blame the actors, they did the best they could with bad directing, writing, and editing which made scenes feel all over the place. It's a wonder the actors didn't (for the most part) add to the problems. Once heather and her companion Vincent (Kit Harrington) reach the eerie town things do pick up a bit. Of course going from poor to mediocre isn't really praise worthy. I wanted to like the movie, but that was nearly impossible to do. One day or maybe in some other reality, Silent Hill was or will be made to live up to its potential. Silent Hill: Revelation comes nowhere close.

*1/2 out of ****