Sonic the Hedgehog is finally spinning into theaters this weekend after several months of visual effects tweaking to correct the ghoulish mistake that was the title character’s original design. The film will mark the latest video game adaptation to hit theaters, a dragon that Hollywood has been chasing for over a quarter century and still hasn’t managed to quite get right. Because unlike film adaptations of other “low” art such as comic books, we’ve still yet to see a video game movie that was really, actually good.

I have no idea why that is. Making a movie out of established brands is pretty hit-or-miss (for every The Lego Movie there are around 30 of The Emoji Movie), so the temptation to just make a bland movie out of long-established tropes and slap a FInal Fantasy logo on it is probably hard to overcome. And in some cases, like 1993’s Super Mario Bros., the problem seems to stem from a lack of any real film-able narrative in the source material, forcing the filmmakers to create their movies based on what they think the game is about and ending up with a movie that could best be described as secondhand reporting of a crime scene.

That said, while there may not be any truly good video game movies, there are definitely fun video game movies, and a few that have managed to become classics. I’ve done my best to rank every one from Worst to Greatest, with a view notable caveats, because as it turns out there are a shitload of them. My list excludes any animated movies (even though I genuinely liked Ratchet & Clank), because if I start trying to rank all of the Pokémon and Street Fighter animes I will simply turn to dust in my chair. I also excluded a few straight-to-DVD and international releases, most notably the Tekken films and DOA: Dead or Alive, because I’m never fucking watching those movies. But other than that, this list is fairly definitive, so read on to discover which are worth a rental and which should go the way of the Nintendo Cereal System.

25. Every Uwe Boll Movie

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Image via Lions Gate Films

Uwe Boll has made a career out of filming tax shelters masquerading as video game adaptations, and every single one of his films is bad in a uniquely baffling way. House of the Dead, which is one of the few Boll films to get a theatrical release in the U.S., might also be his best. It’s cheesy as hell and it has nothing to do with the video game series (which only ever had the barest bones of stories), but it has a weird charm that Boll never manages to recapture. I’ll be brief with the rest, because they’re all acidic trash heaps: Alone in the Dark features Christian Slater’s widow’s peak and an unintentionally hilarious chase scene set to a steel drum solo, BloodRayne is softcore nerd porn starring Oscar winner Ben Kingsley, Postal is an 8chan thread come to life, In the Name of the King features Ray Liotta as an evil medieval wizard dressed like a Johnny Cash roadie, and Far Cry has a bizarre cameo by Anthony Bourdain. There, I’ve just saved you 7 ½ hours of eye-searing terribality.

24. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation

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Image via New Line Cinema

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation takes all of the good will of the previous film and pawns it for a collection of Pogs based on forgotten properties of the ‘90s, such as Eek! The Cat, or The Incredible Crash Test Dummies. The film recasts all but two of the lead actors from the original and appears to have been filmed in between takes on the set of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys with costumes stolen from Party City. Despite this movie coming out two years after Mortal Kombat, the visual effects are somehow worse, and they are used to create such memorable scenes as transforming The X-FilesBrian Thompson into a dragon. There are more named characters in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation than in the entirety of Game of Thrones, and most of them die just as quickly. Unless they simply disappear, which also happens!

23. Double Dragon

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Image via Gramercy Pictures

I can write approximately 100 words about 1994’s Double Dragon, and most of them would be about the constellation of hair spread across Robert Patrick’s skull. He has a bleached-blond high top fade and a ‘90s coffee shop goatee. He looks like a police sketch artist’s interpretation of one of the Thundercats on their way to a job interview. He looks like an alternate head for a Vanilla Ice doll. He looks like he sued A Flock of Seagulls for defamation in 1983. Somehow, Patrick is the villain of this bizarrely kid-friendly yet weirdly grotesque adaptation of the gritty beat-em-up arcade series Double Dragon. Despite the presence of the gloriously delightful Mark Dacascos, this film is aggressively terrible, and should be avoided at all costs.

22. Wing Commander

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Wing Commander is a film that came out in 1999 in every possible way you can interpret that phrase. Its lead actors are Freddie Prinze, Jr., Matthew Lillard, and Deep Blue Sea’s Saffron Burrows. Famously hated by fans of the game series despite the fact that it was written and directed by the game’s creator (who also grew to hate the film), the movie is like a terrible live-action version of Titan A.E. with godawful special effects and boring characters. There’s virtually no conflict beyond the standard “we must defeat the evil aliens” trope, and considering we barely see the aforementioned aliens, it’s hard to really get invested in anything that’s going on. Prinze has a particularly embarrassing role to play as the special boy with one of the most ludicrous super powers in the history of science fiction and fantasy. Worst of all, Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell are nowhere to be found.

21. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li will forever be remembered as the Street Fighter movie nobody had any idea existed. Quietly released in February of 2009 to theater-going audiences who wanted absolutely nothing to do with it, the film quickly faded into obscurity to such a degree that I usually have to provide photographic evidence to convince people I’m not making it up. It’s the Jonah Hex of video game adaptations. It inexplicably features Oscar nominee Michael Clarke Duncan getting impaled by a frozen pipe, and while that may sound like solid B movie action cheese, the film is so generic and boring that it takes a physical toll on you just to watch it. Imagine trading a portion of your immortal soul to watch the Street Fighter: The Movie arcade game in attract mode for 90 minutes, and you’ve essentially gained the experience of watching The Legend of Chun-Li.

20. Max Payne

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Max Payne exists in the shadow realm of films made in the aughts that are destined to become bar trivia questions every team is too drunk to answer. I completely forgot this movie existed, and if we’re being totally honest, I also forgot about the game. The titular police detective is on a quest for vengeance after his wife and child are killed, which sees him blasting his way through corrupt politicians and business moguls to get to the truth. The game was a cool neo-noir action title with some interesting plot twists and a fun “bullet time” mechanic, but the film is a boring slog of confusion. For some inexplicable reason, the filmmakers altered or outright removed huge sections of the plot, leaving the movie a jumbled mess that not even fans of the game could decipher. Bewilderingly, the movie dipped its beak into the supernatural and added literal demons, which are 100% not in the game. Imagine someone rebooting Chinatown and throwing in a couple of werewolves, and you’ll get an idea of how much of a tonal shift the movie was from the source material. It might actually be less harmful for you to burn the Max Payne DVD and breathe in the toxic fumes than to ever watch it.

19. Silent Hill: Revelation

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Image via Open Road Films

Take all of the positive things you've ever felt about a film, wrap those things in an old Freddy Kruger t-shirt, then set the shirt on fire and throw it down a haunted mine shaft, shouting sentence fragments at it all the way down. That’s the gist of Silent Hill: Revelation, a boring-ass kaleidoscope of played-out horror film tropes and varsity-level gibberish masquerading as dialogue. This sequel to the 2006 original is a terrible film with absolutely zero redeeming qualities, and it deserves nothing less than to never be watched by anyone. Sean Bean, reprising his role from the previous film, manages to defy the odds and survive once again, making him two-for-two in the Silent Hill series, so I guess that’s notable. That said, he does wander off into mist at the end to find his missing family and we never got a Silent Hill 3, so maybe he did die.

18. Hitman: Agent 47

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Hitman: Agent 47 is the second Hitman film in a row to make the critical error of not casting Jason Statham as the titular bald assassin. Perhaps he felt the series was too similar to his Transporter franchise, perhaps the production couldn’t afford him, or perhaps the script was so bad he did a dazzling series of kicks to eject the producers from his office for even bringing him a copy. There is a slight possibility that the makers of Hitman: Agent 47 never even approached Statham, but the very notion is so foolish I don’t want to consider it any further. Anyway, this sequel/reboot recasts the role vacated by Timothy Olyphant with Rupert Friend, and if you just said, “Who?”, please consider skipping this movie forever, because it has nothing to offer you. Zachary Quinto co-stars as a bulletproof villain who gets electrocuted into a weird ghost human in a post-credits sequence, which is almost certainly a reference to the game series but one that I do not understand. It is a remarkably bad film loaded with the type of CGI-augmented action that I find boring and lame.

17. Super Mario Bros.

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Image via Buena Vista

1993’s Super Mario Bros. has the distinction of being the first ever movie based on a video game, and the first movie in which Hollywood legend Dennis Hopper is mutated into Nickelodeon slime by an underselling Nintendo peripheral. Helmed by two commercial directors who had also co-created the 1980s British television character Max Headroom, the production famously went through several rewrites before landing on the truly bizarre concept of "Blade Runner But With Dinosaurs". The production design on the film is legitimately impressive and unique, which is a shame, because the movie itself is a rampaging dumpster fire. It’s boring and dense and doesn’t seem to have any idea of where any of this is going, which is probably the result of the script being revised on a daily basis. The most notable thing about Super Mario Bros. is arguably the fact that the jump boots used by Mario and Luigi were later worn by Nicolas Cage in the thrilling 1997 docudrama Face/Off.

16. Street Fighter

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Image via Universal Pictures

Listen. If you’re judging the quality of a film based on how well it stands the test of time, how much it contributes to the culture, and how hard it tries to convince you that Jean Claude Van Damme was born in America, Street Fighter deserves to be in the upper echelon. 1994’s Street Fighter is simultaneously the greatest and most embarrassing film of that year, Shawshank be damned. Essentially taking the characters from Street Fighter II and assigning them random roles in a family-friendly action plot, the film feels like a combination of G.I. Joe and American Gladiators. The crowning jewel of the film, and the reason it should be entered into the library of congress and protected at all costs, is Raúl Juliá’s hamboniest of hambone performances as the villainous M. Bison. Street Fighter is the dumbest thing in the whole entire universe, and I watch it every time it comes on TV. If for no other reason, it deserves respect for Juliá’s immortal line, “For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday."

15. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

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Image via Disney

Full disclosure - I convinced my brothers to go with me to see Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in the theater, because I thought it might be good. I drove an hour to see it. I bought popcorn. I thought maybe that since producer Jerry Bruckheimer had recently struck gold in an historically unsuccessful genre with the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, some of that magic dust might sprinkle over to the world of video game movies. This was an incorrect assumption. Prince of Persia is one of the best-looking dull movies I’ve ever seen. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a Caucasian Middle Eastern prince with a British accent, and exhibits zero chemistry with his co-star Gemma Artereton. Ben Kingsley also collects a paycheck, and there is a bizarre amount of screen time dedicated to Alfred Molina’s stable of racing ostriches. It’s a really big swing for Disney and an even bigger miss.

14. Need for Speed

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Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

The first thing you need to know about Need for Speed is that Aaron Paul does not say the word “bitch” one single solitary time. The second thing you need to know is that it is a shitty Fast and Furious clone that still heroically manages to be over two hours long despite being fatally boring. Which is a shame, because along with Paul, the movie has an impressive cast, including Imogen Poots, Dominic Cooper, future Oscar winner Rami Malek and Oscar nominee Michael Keaton (in the same year he was nominated for the award). It was another entry in a string of overlong action turds doled out by Disney, after John Carter and The Lone Ranger, but amazingly Need for Speed actually did quite well, which is something I will never understand. At least John Carter was in space.

13. Assassin’s Creed

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Image via 20th Century Fox

Assassin’s Creed is about a guild of noble assassins and their centuries-long battle against the villainous Knights Templar. Each installment of the video game series takes place during a notable period of history, like the Renaissance or Ancient Egypt, which is a big part of the franchise’s appeal. Who doesn’t want to do bitchin’ parkour stunts throughout antiquity? Unfortunately, the Assassin’s Creed movie suffers from the same mistake made by several games in the series, which is building the plot around modern-day humans essentially sitting in giant VR chairs to transport themselves into the past. The handful of awesome action sequences set in the past are constantly being interrupted by teleporting us to the future to watch Michael Fassbender flail around in his action chair and then wander around a dull antiseptic facility collecting wooden exposition from the likes of Michael K. Williams and Marion “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” Cotillard. It’s a baffling storytelling device. Just set the movie in the past. Why do we need to keep flashing forward to the future? It’s like randomly breaking up Gladiator every 20 minutes to show Russell Crowe wearing an Oculus Rift and swinging his arms around in an internet cafe.

12. Doom: Annihilation

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Universal Pictures Home Entertainment

The most surprising thing about the recent direct-to-VOD film Doom: Annihilation is that it isn’t terrible. It most certainly is not good, and no one could ever accuse me of saying so, but it made more of an effort to tie into the storyline of the games than the 2005 theatrical adaptation, and that counts for something. Amy Manson does a decent job of carrying the film as the leader of a team of marines sent to reclaim a research base from horde of invading demons. And the ending action sequence, wherein Manson is transported to Literal Hell and has to do battle with what can best be described as Wizard Satan, is pretty got damn metal. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie is kind of slow, and the sets look like something you would’ve seen on Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s the Jaws 2 of video game movies - not the best the genre has to offer, but definitely not the worst.

11. Hitman

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Image via 20th Century Fox

2007’s Hitman doesn’t have a lot of fans, but I will watch anything Timothy Olyphant does with a gigantic smile on my face, even if it’s Catch and Release or “stealing my car.” And even though I thought his casting in the film was a bit strange - the titular hitman, Agent 47, is a meticulous killer with a low, sophisticated accent who never loses his temper - I found it immensely enjoyable as a slightly cheesy action/thriller. Olyphant definitely puts his own spin on Agent 47, turning him into an irritable ball of simmering violence just barely holding onto his composure, but it’s undeniably a fun performance, and he has some delightful exchanges with his co-star Olga Kurylenko. It feels like watching Olyphant complete an extended set of missions in the game, so if you’re a fan of either part of that sentence, you’re going to get more out of Hitman than most people.

10. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - The Cradle of Life

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Image via Paramount Pictures

For the life of me, I cannot remember what happened in the sequel Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - The Cradle of Life versus what happened in the original, because they’re virtually identical movies. Angelina Jolie returns as Croft, alongside Non-Swole Gerard Butler as a scoundrel named Terry whom she used to date. There’s a decent dynamic between the two that reminds me of films like Out of Sight - they’re working together so well, but you know once they reach the treasure all bets are going to be off. In this installment, said treasure is Pandora’s Box, which is supposed to contain a world-ending plague. (Interestingly, a version of this idea is used in the 2018 reboot.) I definitely remember Ciarán Hinds getting kicked into mythological acid at the end, so you should absolutely stay tuned for that. Speed director Jan de Bont does a competent job filming all the action, but as far as I’m concerned both Jolie Tomb Raiders are the same damn movie. Very OK, super dated, and fun to watch with a bunch of friends so you can crack jokes at all the considerable early-aughts cheese.

9. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider

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Image via Paramount Pictures

Tomb Raider is a franchise based around a character created to be a sex symbol for teenage boys, so it makes perfect sense that a film adaptation released in the year of our lord 2001 would star Angelina Jolie and be directed by the guy who made Con Air. Jolie stars as Lara Croft, an Indiana Jones analogue who raids tombs for their sweet, sweet riches. Co-starring in the film are a pre-Bond Daniel Craig and the ghost of Jon Voight, who help Lara find two pieces of an artifact that can control time. It’s aggressively OK as an extremely dated action movie, and appropriately is more interesting as an artifact of a forgotten era rather than an actual film. But Lara Croft: Tomb Raider managed to do pretty well, and is arguably the reason Jolie became an international megastar. So… good job? It’s very dumb, but far from the dumbest entry on this list.

8. Doom

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Image via Universal Pictures

When viewed through the lens of the year 2020, 2005’s Doom has a hell of a cast. Karl Urban, Oscar nominee Rosamund Pike, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in a supporting role as the villain? Why hasn’t this film been elected president? Unfortunately, the answer is “because it’s kind of boring.” For some inexplicable reason, the long-gestating adaptation decided to have almost nothing to do with the source material, jettisoning the demonic hellgate storyline and replacing it with an incredibly lame alien mutation that gives good people super-strength and turns bad people into monsters, with super-strength. It can somehow judge the content of your character but badly misunderstands what constitutes a punishment. Baffling plot aside, the movie’s “action” consists primarily of a group of disposable characters wandering through identical dark hallways and occasionally shooting a zombie entirely too many times. Bizarrely, 1997’s Event Horizon is a more faithful adaptation of Doom than the actual Doom movie. But this one has a strange charm, thanks to a handful of memorable quotes from Johnson and Urban and a couple of interesting action scenes. Sadly Pike, as great as she is, isn’t given much to do.

7. Warcraft

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Image via Universal Pictures

Ultimately directed by Duncan Jones after spending 10 years in development, Warcraft is one of only a handful of films to gross over $400 million worldwide without cracking $100 million in the United States. One of the others is Terminator Genisys, which should give you a good idea of the kind of quality on the table here. Warcraft, like Terminator 3 Part II, is an extremely silly movie. It’s also a gorgeous fantasy film with some genuinely compelling characters among the Orcs. Unfortunately, the human characters are pretty wooden, and the movie winds up being a two-hour prologue to a story we will probably never get to see, judging by the film’s poor domestic reception. Imagine if the opening to Fellowship of the Ring lasted for 120 minutes and then we never got to see the rest of Lord of the Rings, and that’s what Warcraft is. But it's an immensely watchable prologue, if nothing else.

6. The Resident Evil Series

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Image via ScreenGems

I’m just going to count the entire Resident Evil film series as a single entry, because they’re all essentially the same early 2000s action movie. As a huge fan of the video game series, I have a complicated relationship with the films - I respect their decision to make an entirely new storyline, but all I really want to see is a direct adaptation of the games in the main series, because I love a specific kind of “dumb.” They’re all perfectly fine action horror films, but I constantly forget how many there are and which movie is which, and I refuse to believe they all weren’t released in the year 2003. If you put Romeo Must Die and Underworld into a juicer and sprayed the resulting cocktail into the crowd at a Hawthorne Heights concert, the Resident Evil films would begin to grow from the folds of their wristbands.