Doom is the best videogame-to-movie adaptation ever made, but that's not saying much. Loosely based on ID software's genre-defining shoot-em-up (which itself owes a heavy debt to The Evil Dead) the film follows a troop of factory-finished badass marines on a trip to Mars, where angry monsters are playing skiprope with the intestines of a luckless scientific research team. The marines have names like Sarge, Reaper, Destroyer and Bite Off My Head You Alien Scum.

Director Andrzej Bartkowiak shows commendable restraint in keeping the monsters offscreen long enough to give us a passing acquaintance with his musclebound gang of sterotypes. There's even a girl scientist, played by Rosamund Pike, who gets the really cherishable stupid lines ("I'm a forensic anthropologist - I go where the work is," she tells Karl Urban's brooding hero). Character development thus dealt with, the movie turns into a meat grinder as the soldiers meet their blood-soaked doom at the hands of mutated genetic beasties. The original Doom's spooky occult trappings have been dispensed with; science is the bad guy here. Well, science and The Rock, manfully controlling his eyebrows in a rare villainous role.

"INVENTIVE SUSPENSE"

Towards the end of the film, the camera assumes the classic first person viewpoint of the game, in an extended sequence that's both a nod to fans and a genuinely inventive suspense device. There's nothing to approach this level of panache in the rest of the film, which is essentially a second rate Aliens knock-off. Still, it's a guilty pleasure.