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  Germany/Canada. 2008. Director – Uwe Boll, Screenplay – Michael Roesch, Peter Scheerer & Masaji Takei, Based on the Videogame by Crytek, Producers – Uwe Boll, Daniel Clarke & Shawn Williamson, Photography – Mathias Neumann, Music – Jessica De Rooij, Visual Effects – Rise Visual Effects Berlin (Supervisor – Florian Gellinger), Technicolor Creative Services Vancouver & Beijing (Supervisors – Phil Jones & Doug Oddy) & TVT. Film + VFX GmbH, Special Effects Supervisor – Jak Osmond, Prosthetics Supervisor – Todd Masters, Production Design – Tink. Production Company – Boll KG/Bright Light Pictures. Cast: Til Schweiger (Jack Carver), Emmanuelle Vaugier (Valerie Cardinal), Udo Kier (Dr Lucas Krieger), Natalia Avelon (Katia Chernov), Chris Coppola (Emillio), Ralf Moeller (Max Cardinal), Craig Fairbrass (Jason Parker), Don S. Davis (General Roderick), Jay Brazeau (Ralph), Suzanne Ristic (Theresa), Michael Paré (Paul Summer), Michael Robinson (Tourist George), Carrie Genzel (Tourist Laura)  

Far Cry is another of Uwe Boll’s videogame adaptations. It is based on the first-person shooter game from Ubisoft, which premiered in 2004. The plot of the film follows the game reasonably closely in which the player took up the part of Jack Carver, a former Special Forces operative working as a charter boat captain who is hired by the journalist Valerie Constantine, his boat is blown up and he is stranded on an archipelago of South Pacific islands where he must fight off the mercenaries and various genetic engineering experiments created by the mad scientist Dr Krieger. Being made on a lesser budget, the range of creatures and exotic locations in the game have been decidedly telescoped down when it comes to the film.

While I have defended some of Uwe Boll’s films and he has been showing overall improvement, Far Cry is a slip back into typical Boll shoddy production values. It has in abundance all the hallmarks of what it is that people criticize about Boll’s films. It comes with the loud and noisy boilerplate action sequences that Boll loves to throw in, most of which seem to happen at random and do nothing to advance the plot – there is a long vehicle chase sequence across the island with Til Schweiger and Emmanuelle Vaugier driving backwards in an SUV amid dramatics about dropped hand grenades and the vehicle being set on fire, before the laughable scene where Vaugier accidentally fires a harpoon that goes through the roof of the SUV and attaches itself to a helicopter overhead whereupon the SUV is whisked up off the side of a cliff, falls into the sea below and the harpoon gets wound up in the helicopter’s blades causing it to explode. There is another completely random boat chase sequence during the middle of the film. The entire film from the plot to the action sequences to the conception of Udo Kier’s mad science scheme feels like it has been slapped together by Boll with even more of a slapdash indifference than usual. The action sequences in Alone in the Dark and especially In the Name of the King at least had a kinetic energy if not an imagination, whereas here they are only cheap, uninvolving and not particularly convincing – as with most of Uwe Boll’s films, you can edit them out and not change the plot one bit. The scene where Til Schweiger and Emmanuelle Vaugier cuddle up for the purpose of ‘sharing body warmth’ is one of the most ridiculously contrived and awkward seeming love sequences ever written outside of a porn film.

There is plenty of the usual bad acting that infects Uwe Boll’s films. Cast as the supposedly American hero, German actor Til Schweiger plays with a lazy cockiness that shows he is not taking much of the show seriously. Coming in his accent, the one-liners lack the appropriate comic-book inflection they should have and fall flat. The upshot is this is that he comes across as seeming contemptuous of the show around him. This is also a film where Uwe Boll seems to feel the need to throw in excruciating comedy relief – Jay Brazeau as a boat rental owner, or the terrible performances of Michael Robinson and Carrie Genzel as the two loathsome American tourists that we encounter in the opening scenes. The worst part of the film however is the loud and obnoxious performance provided by Chris Coppola as the food delivery man who gets dragged into the action during the latter half of the film. Coppola’s comic relief element quickly becomes the most irritating thing about Far Cry.

Uwe Boll’s other genre films are:- the serial killer film Sanctimony (2000); the backwoods horror Blackwoods (2002); the high school shooting rampage film Heart of America (2003); the zombie film/videogameadaptation House of the Dead (2003); the monster movie/videogame adaptation Alone in the Dark (2005); the vampire hunting videogame adaptation BloodRayne (2005) and its sequels Bloodrayne: Deliverance (2007) and Bloodrayne: The Third Reich (2010); the fantasy adventure In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007) and its sequel In the Name of the King: Two Worlds (2011); the videogame adaptation Postal (2007), a surreal bad taste satire about a shooting rampage; Seed (2007) about an executed killer returned from the grave; Rampage (2009) about a man on a killing spree; Stoic (2009) about sadism and brutality in a prison; the horror film Final Storm (2010); and the gonzo comedy Bluberella (2011).Boll has also produced the ghost story They Wait (2007), Alone in the Dark II (2008) and Zombie Massacre (2012).

Other films adapted from video/computer games include:- Super Mario Bros. (1993), Street Fighter (1994), Double Dragon (1994), Mortal Kombat (1995), Wing Commander (1999), Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), Lara Croft, Tomb Raider (2001), Resident Evil (2002), Doom (2005), DOA: Dead or Alive (2006), Silent Hill (2006), Hitman (2007), Max Payne (2008), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) and Tekken (2010).