Silent Hill,\ the latest video game film adaptation, certainly has more ambition than the usual shoot-em-up knockoff like ""Doom."" With ""Brotherhood of the Wolf"" director Christophe Gans and ""Pulp Fiction"" co-scribe Roger Avary, ""Silent Hill"" is unique in that it has respectable talent behind it. But even if it delivers on the technical level, ""Silent Hill"" as a whole is a long, tedious mess that will win only the admiration of diehard players of the game.
The film duplicates the game's drearily stylized world faithfully, with CGI ash liberally falling from the skies. It's the kind of movie with ""state-of-the-art"" special effects that are passable now but will look painfully dated a few years down the line. Even though Gans generously infuses ""Silent Hill"" with gory atmosphere, it will not be memorable. It drags on far too long to sustain its incoherence, as creative as a few set pieces appear to be, and does not fulfill its potential to have been the first adequate video game adaptation.
Radha Mitchell (""Pitch Black,"" ""Melinda and Melinda"") plays Rose De Silva, a concerned mother trying to care for her mysteriously disturbed, adopted daughter (Jodelle Ferland). Believing the answer lies in the mysterious ghost town of Silent Hill, Rose heads out to find it, but ends up spinning her car out and knocking herself unconscious.
She awakens in Silent Hill without her daughter and begins to desperately wander the fog-obscured streets in search of her. Along the way, Rose encounters a tough motorcycle cop and a ratty-haired woman mumbling about her child, both of whom continue to pop in and out of the increasingly disjointed proceedings. Meanwhile, Rose's husband (Sean Bean) asks a lot of questions and provides superfluous, annoying backstory to punctuate Rose's frequently gruesome misadventures.
Some imagination permeates into the movie's more surreal sequences: an attack by a shirtless executioner with a triangular helmet and a sword with the girth of a battering ram delivers, as does one hell of a witch burning and its subsequent climactic massacre. But the sheer volume of CGI overwhelms even these highlights, and creates an overall product that feels like a glorified jumble of cutscenes.
Gans and Avary earn their R rating in bloody spades, but their hellish theatrics are buried beneath context-less tension and protracted build-up. It's less a peculiar ghost tale than a series of sloppily assembled, dreamlike events attached to a certain well-worn, metaphysical ending that's long past its expiration date.
Gans should not be faulted for this cluttered, nonsensical film, as he squeezes as much creepiness as he can from Avary's surprisingly weak screenplay. Even though he used to be associated with Quentin Tarantino, ""Silent Hill"" marks indisputable proof that Avary wasn't responsible for the dialogue in ""Pulp Fiction's"" Oscar-winning script, considering its surplus of belabored, humorless lines.
A dull slog through tiresome clichés, ""Silent Hill"" is a hodgepodge of religious themes culled straight from ""The Wicker Man"" and ""Footloose"" that is only jolted to life by an occasional stint of graphic carnage. This game's fanboys will undoubtedly embrace this as an authentic translation, but ordinary moviegoers unfamiliar with the game will only be frustrated and bored by the film.
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