I don't know a whole lot about the Mutant Chronicles franchise. I'm pretty sure it's a role-playing game along the lines of Dungeons & Dragons, only instead of wizards and fairies it's beefcakes and mutants blowing each other up in your basic “world at war” future dystopia scenario. Oh yeah, and it was created by Swedish people... damn Swedes and their... bikini team... I got nothin'. Anyway, never having been a big advocate of pencil & paper role-play (I'm no Vin Diesel after all), my limited exposure to the property has been the Super Nintendo game Doom Troopers (no legally binding relation to the Sci-Fi Channel original, S.S. Doomtrooper) and the comic book mini-series “Golgotha”, memorable only because it was illustrated by Simon “Most Metal Comic Artist EVER” Bisley. Beyond that, you can drudge up more on the Mutant Chronicles by bypassing your local library and checking out the Wiki page. Nothing on there is ever perfectly correct, but it's close enough.

Way back in the past (or way up in the future, I'm not 100% on it), a machine fell from space that transformed people into monsters. Gathered under the leadership of a dude named Nakdan (don't crucify me on the spelling, it's a guess), the remaining humans of Earth sealed the mutant engine away under a protective seal that would go to be guarded for centuries by a group of Nakdan's homies and their kin deemed The Brotherhood. The Bros kept the story of the monster maker alive through the centuries via their bible-of-sorts, the Mutant Chronicles. Yes ladies and gentlemen, we have our title!

FF>> to the year 2707 where the planet's technology is a steampunk fetishist's dream come true, and the old “the world is run by corporations” plot device kicks in, with four such evil empires having divided the planet. Mishima Inc. owns much of Asia, Bauhaus Co. owns most of Europe and a chunk of Africa, Imperial Industries owns the rest of Africa and all of Australia, and Consolidated Capitol owns both Americas and the rest of Europe. Not so much concerned with stocks, employee negotiations, or product advertisement, the quartet of companies just attack each other all year round with their privately funded militaries in a struggle for property rights to the last remaining resources left on the dirtball. Wow, you can really tell this is based on a franchise made in the early-90s, because there isn't a lick of originality left in this conceptual teat that b-movies haven't already sucked dry at this point.

While Bahaus (kinda like the Germans) and Capitol (kinda like the US) trade military bitch slaps in Eastern Europe, their conflict eventually uncovers the giant seal locking away the real bad guys... and they immediately blow the ever-lovin' shit out of it. Before you can say “Blue Light Special on Aisle 3”, a horde of hideous demons with concern for nothing but their own savage blood thirst swarm the battlefield and start ravaging any man in uniform they can get their giant bone-spike appendages into! Heads are speared, limbs are flayed, bodies are torn in half. It's almost as gruesome and carnage strewn as the midnight releases for new Harry Pooter books... errr, “Potter”...

Capitol army Sergeant John “Mitch” Hunter (Tom Jane) escapes the bloody brouhaha, only to become part of the plan to go back and shut the Creepy Crawler factory down later. After Samuel (Ron Perlman with a HEAVY Irish accent), head of the Brotherhood, hears the bad news, he seeks support from the Corporations in sending the demons back to their hole in the Earth. As you can imagine he gets none, as instead the decrepit old dinosaurs (one of which is John Malkovich) decide the best option will be to evacuate as many of their employees as possible to off-planet locales until this whole “world devouring hellbeasts” thing blows over. Samuel offers another option: give him 20 soldiers and a ship and he'll lead his small “can't fail” strike force against the machine itself and save the day Magnificent Seven style... only without the horses and cowboy hats. The CEOs of Doom decide to go ahead with the evacuations anyway, and cluster fucks of Ishtar proportions explode left and right! Evac ships crash into each other, killing hundreds of passengers within before slamming into desperate mobs on the streets below as flaming balls of steel... incidentally, “Flaming Balls of Steel” used to be the name of my sideshow act when I worked Coney Island. The pay was never great, but I got all the chicken heads and meth I could ingest! Archie and Edith had one thing right; those were the days.

Knocking on death's door himself and in need of spiritual redemption, Constantine (he's the Malkovich guy) offers up his own ship to Samuel as well as some evacuation passes off the planet for him to buy off some soldiers with for his little crusade. The ship in question won't carry 20 though (guess Constantine didn't hold many corporate orgy parties on it), so Sammy's gotta make do with the few cohorts he can drudge up instead. Along with his vow-of-silence-taking sidekickstress Severian, Samuel recruits Imperial officer John McGuire (in it because killing demons makes sense to him), Mishima's Valerie Duval (kick ass single mom assassin who's there cuz she's played by Devon Aoki) and Juba Kim Wu (Asian kamikaze death wish stereotype), Bauhaus's Max von Steiner (military leader with the “but will he follow?” drama factor), and Capitol's Jesus de Barrera (going along because Samuel promised his mom would go to Heaven), and of course the aforementioned Mitch Hunter (there as a favor to a dead comrade). This is of course the rag tag “former rivals brought together to fight a common enemy” group that movies about the last desperate fight to prevent the end of the world always give us, so expect lots of scenes of them getting into petty arguments before saving each other from certain death and creating some of those “unbreakable bonds forged in battle” relationships that will only end when the characters are killed off one-by-one in the coming raid. Did I spoil it for you? Sorry, years of generic story lines have desensitized me to not “spoiling” cookie cutter plots for others. So sue me... all you'll get out of it are some “Jason Vs. Leatherface” comics and a half-eaten box of unfrosted blueberry Pop Tarts anyway.

After a quick orientation with the Brotherhood about what they're up against, our Frankenstein militia are given an ancient piece of the mutant machine originally torn out by Nakdan and friends that may or may not be a bomb. Nobody's really sure how it works, but they think it'll blow up the monster maker when used properly... then again, for all anybody knows it could be the missing cog to the mutants' soft-serve ice cream maker... which they might just be laying siege to the world just to find... because they fuckin' love their soft-serve ice cream? Whatever the case, shit blows up, people die, heads get speared and splattered, Mitch does the tough-guy-with-a-heart-of-gold thing that only the hero can get away with doing a few times, Hellboy gives us a philosophy lecture, some really improbable shit happens with a not-as-dead-as-we-thought character, somebody pulls an Old Yeller, the good guys go through something that looks like an “American Gladiators” obstacle course from Hell, and in the end it's a lot like the Lord of the Rings trilogy done in 1/3 of the time and 1/100 of the budget. Oh yeah, and it ends with the set up for a sequel, but if one ever gets made I'll eat my limited edition Re-Animator paperweight.

I like Thomas Jane. I met him once. The guy's a confessed horror comic geek and he knows his “Tales From the Crypt” from his “Vault of Horror”. Unfortunately, his raspy “non-acting” method of acting makes it hard to watch him sometimes. He was good in The Mist, and albeit a little emo he wasn't terrible in The Punisher, but only Clint Eastwood should be allowed to do the “gargles with nitric acid” voice cuz he seems to be the only one who can do it right. As for the rest? Ron Perlman should only stick to hard-ass a-hole roles, Devon Aoki should let her kung-fu do all her acting for her, and John Malkovich should see somebody about his scenery chewing addiction. Even here, where he's playing a tired, weakened, dying old man, it still feels like I'm watching one of those goofy, overacting, Shakespearean caricatures you only see in sitcoms and cartoons. The movie itself has a very CGI heavy art style to it and places the human actors in front of a lot of green screenage. It's kinda like 300, only the colors aren't nearly as bold... or well financed. More like a washed out, “not great, but still better than a Sci-Fi Channel Original for the most part” style. There are a few moments of legit suspense and a few scenes that felt like the director had more bombastic shit in mind when he put this flick together, but his eyes were bigger than his budget. This leads to times where the movie looks only remotely better than one of those horrible Sega CD/3DO games with the Full Motion Video sequences in them.

With a little more money thrown at it, Mutant Chronicles could've been a late-in-the-Summer Hollywood sci-fi popcorn flick. As it stands, it's a marginally good Direct-to-DVD flick you'll see marqueeing on a Sci-Fi Channel Saturday night premiere sometime in the next few months.