Movies like this are pouring oil on the "oh-my-god-another-zombie- whatever" fire and also give games based movies a bad rap.
For probably no other reason than pure brand marketing, Dead Rising: Watchtower exists.
It doesn't add anything of significance to overall Dead Rising franchise in terms of story or, well - anything. The thing is, Dead Rising games are dumb, dumb but fun and mostly self-aware of that dumbness and all that didn't translate here very well.
On one hand, casting is kinda OK, acting is mediocre at best, uninteresting at worst. But on the other hand, right from the start we don't quite understand should this be serious or campy fun? It should be campy fun but movie just flirts with that on the surface with easter eggs and few obligatory fan service moments. Mostly it's serious and the story and script are far cry from anything interesting and/or original.
Characters are mostly bland and boring, although Rob Riggle is a good choice for Frank West. Beside him, others are just generic reluctant hero, tough girl and off the shelf villain with a dash of zombies and some government conspiracy stuff. Also, it's funny how most of the characters act totally incompetent for the first half of the movie. Like they came from some la-la-land and not the Dead Rising universe that already had few big zombie outbreaks and people are living with medicated zombies around them.
Now, mediocreness of the story and characterization aside, there is one thing that drove me almost bonkers while watching - photography. Camera shooting style is half way generic-TV-show and half way Michael Bayhem. For some reason there are first person shots from weird angles, like from a weapon's angle or zombie's POV. Which is kind of dumb because Dead Rising is a third person game, not FPS and... it's just looks dumb, okay. That and few other unnecessary camera "tricks" made this movie look like a generic post-numetal video from 2001.
I guess I should also mention zombies, right? Well, there aren't much of those during the movie and when there are, they are mostly generic. There are no zombie herds or such, just a few groups here and there. Sometimes they are fast, sometimes they are slow and clunky, it depends on the script requirements at that particular moment in the story. No rules really. Also, combo weapons and zombie kills are not impressive. But they should be, so there's that also.
As you may noticed, the main word here is "generic" and most of the time Dead Rising: Watchower is just that. Story, characters, acting, script, effects, locations, etc.. they are all in that "passable" realm filed under "W" for "whatever". Camera-work is not though, that could definitely be better.
Overall, I'm giving it a 5 out 10 which roughly translates to "you could watch it but you're not missing anything actually". I would like to say it's a cashgrab but I'm not really sure they'll earn much money with this passable generic TV-like movie anyway. Maybe it'll lead into a new Dead Rising game? At least that would be fun for a change.
