REVIEWED - DOOM: THE video game Doom is best remembered for popularising that genre known, in the digital world's unlovely argot, as first-person shoot 'em ups. All the stuff about killer zombies from other planets and crazy genetic experiments and commando raids through gloomy tunnels had already been touched on in other games and films. It was the notion of seeing the violence through the protagonist's eyes that made Doom such a phenomenon.

So does director Andrzej Bartkowiak dare to shoot his entire picture from a first-person perspective? He does not. After a good hour or so of murky, shouty, repetitive mayhem, we are eventually treated to a couple of long single takes in which killing occurs with little else in view but the victims and the weapon.

These sequences will give Doom fans a nostalgic buzz. Much the same effect can, however, be attained by watching the first 10 minutes of John Carpenter's Halloween, with the added advantage that one then gets to enjoy a first-class suspense film. By contrast, the rest of Doom is about as tedious as peering over some selfish gamer's shoulder while, unwilling to let the next person have his go, he plays himself steadily towards Repetitive Strain Injury.

For the record, the picture follows a group of bloodthirsty marines as they seek to rid Mars of a cadre of indifferently rendered monsters. I remember feeling occasionally diverted by their adventures, so - it's hard to tell in the dark - they must have been led by the loveable Rock, rather than his upsetting alter ego, Vin Diesel.

Rosamund Pike, that most glacial of English actors, would, in a year where Jessica Alba had not already played a genetic research scientist, win some sort of award for least convincing boffin. "I'm a forensic anthropologist," she says. "I go where the work is."

Ms Pike, a talented woman here reduced to twaddle, must surely have felt a frisson when she delivered that last phrase.