Video game movies typically attract a built-in audience. If Warcraft or Five Nights at Freddy’s dropped into theaters with any other title, they’d be ignored. The marketable IP ensures attention, for better and worse. Dead Trigger is in the underpopulated camp of video game adaptations that fell into the void the moment they were created. Those who choose to dig it up will find a pathetic zombie action movie that can’t stand alongside the worst Resident Evil sequel.
Mobile games have a strange place in the market. They can sell 200 times more than blockbuster console titles, but they’re still seen as a lesser medium. When Blizzard announced a long-awaited Diablo sequel would be exclusive to mobile devices, the live audience booed them. Phone games have a terrible reputation, even if they’re the most commonly played titles.
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What are the Dead Trigger games?
Dead Trigger and its sequel are bare-bones mobile zombie games. The titles come from a Czech publisher called Madfinger Games, who also have their names on Samurai: Way of the Warrior and Shadowgun. Madfinger rose from the slow downfall of 2K Czech, which has now been subsumed into Hanger 13. 2K Czech was best known for creating the Mafia franchise. A few former employees formed Madfinger in 2008. Other former 2K Czech workers forged Warhorse Studios, the developers of Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Dead Trigger is the best-selling work under Madfinger’s banner. It’s a first-person shooter in the model of something like House of the Dead.
Dead Trigger 2 takes the action off rails to allow players to move freely. Neither game has a narrative focus. Mobile games rarely center around the story. The first title follows Kyle, a survivor with military training who joins a community called New Hope. Kyle bonds with the compound’s leader, Julian. They shoot zombies and collect currency to make improvements. In the game’s finale, Kyle discovers that the zombie plague was a deliberate scheme orchestrated by the rich. The sequel sees Kyle go global and wage war on the undead in several nations. Both games received positive attention on sites like Metacritic. The first title suffered historic amounts of piracy, though the devs were unclear about the exact numbers. They said,
Piracy rate on Android devices, that was unbelievably high. At first we intend to make this game available for as many people as possible – that’s why it was for as little as buck.
But its popularity spawned a feature film.
What is Dead Trigger about?
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Directors |
Mike Cuff and Scott Windhauser |
|---|---|
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Writers |
Heinz Treschnitzer, Mike Cuff, and Scott Windhauser |
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Cast |
Dolph Lundgren, Brooke Johnston, Autumn Reeser |
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Runtime |
91 Minutes |
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Rotten Tomatoes Score: |
5% with less than 50 reviews |
Dead Trigger partially adapts the first game’s narrative, but its approach is abnormal. Rather than telling the generic story, it uses the mobile title as a plot point. Like The Last Starfighter, the game stands in as a recruiting method to continue the war against the undead. Those who earn high scores will pick up real weapons and join the fight. In-universe, the government developed the game. Kyle returns, portrayed by Dolph Lundgren. Captain Kyle Walker is a comically “cool” character. He’s said to be a rock star before he became a zombie-fighting revolutionary and super soldier. Kyle leads the army of gamers-turned-marines to battle the zombie hordes and find a team of scientists who may have developed a cure. The premise hides an otherwise uneventful plot.
Where did Dead Trigger go wrong?
One Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic has weighed in on Dead Trigger. That critic, Bobby LePire for Film Threat, gave it a four out of ten. Only a few audience members bothered to offer their thoughts, leaving the project with a 5% positive score. To mirror the opinion of most, Dead Trigger isn’t the worst video game movie ever made. It wouldn’t even crack the top ten. It comes across like an Asylum knock-off of Resident Evil: Apocalypse. The narrative is sluggish and uninspired. The action lacks impact. The characters are either soulless or ripped from other titles. Lundgren has more to do in his Expendables films, leaving him a poor showcase. Though everything looks cheap and gray, Dead Trigger isn’t an abysmal film. It doesn’t try hard enough to inspire hatred. It’s a cold, dull waste of time. It’s closer to a corpse than a zombie.
Dead Trigger is so lifeless that its release sparked no reaction. Saban, the company behind Power Rangers, brought Dead Trigger to the States without fanfare. It dropped into a few theaters and every digital on-demand service to an indifferent public. How does a movie with one recognizable star and a well-received video game behind it drop silently into the void? It’s a consequence of modern film distribution. No one cared enough to put Dead Trigger in front of viewers who might enjoy it. A similar absence of interest extended to the filmmakers and the audience. It’s not even worth watching to mock. Dead Trigger should stay buried.
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