This is the biggest problem with game-based films. What makes a game great is not necessarily translatable to the silver screen. Tetris is one of the most popular games ever, but I doubt you could make a movie out of stacking boxes. Likewise, 120 minutes of a fat Italian man jumping on turtles would probably not break the box office.\n\nThe reason is (partly) this: In a game you react to the action because you are actually performing it. It doesn't matter if you are Crash Bandicoot, Lara Croft or Heihachi Mishima. There doesn't need to be a story line. Most classic games just had one screen of text explaining the backstory, which was essentially unnecessary to the enjoyment of the game. The princess has been kidnapped. Somebody set us up the bomb!\nIn a film, the writer, director and actor all need to work together to make us understand the character and empathize with him/her/it. If they don't, we have no connection to the character - and therefore to the action - and we're just watching a two hour long parkour video.\n\nGame franchises that have more of a story line are (for the reasons listed above) almost universally awful as movies, and only appeal to fans of the games. The true test is to show the movie to an audience who has never heard of the game franchise and see if they like it. We who are fans of a franchise are often blind to the shortcomings of these films, we remember our feelings from playing the game, and transpose them onto the film.\n\nThe only way to make it work IMO is to give the backstory, setting and characters to real screen writers and have them write a script that isn't a recreation of the game. Get a real director and make him direct the movie based on this script, not the game. It looks like this is what they did here.