Unreal Movie Review: Gamer

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Gamer is the third death-row-inmates-play-nationally-televised-deathsport film in the past few years, after The Condemned and Death Race, but what it lacks in originality, it makes up for in execution, no pun intended. Sadly, as the film does start off sprinting, it gets winded in the middle and completely collapses by the end. It’s trash that for a second looked like it could be something more, but then succumbed to its own awfulness before anything could come of it.

Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall) is now the richest man in the world, thanks to his two projects that revolutionized the way us fat, lazy Americans live our lives. He has invented mind-control technology, which allows one human full governance over another. When his military aspirations went bust, he turned to the entertainment sector, first creating a Second Life-type environment called “Society” where fat, ugly people control younger, hotter “actors” who they can make do anything they want. His second endeavor is far more deadly, a shooter called “Slayers” where gamers control death row inmates in real-life combat scenarios. Thirty battles survived and the prisoner goes free.

Kable (Gerard Butler) is the closest any convict has ever come to release. He’s won 26 battles, thanks in part to his controller, 17 year-old supergamer Simon (Logan Lerman), and is four away from seeing his wife (currently an actor in Society) and daughter again. But when an anti-Castle resistance group called Humanz informs him his masters have no plans on letting him live that long, he arranges an escape and seeks revenge on the man who took his life away.

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No, collars do not exist in the future.

One thing that Gamer has going for it, that Death Race and The Condemned were lacking, is style. Both those films were gritty and grimy and gory in just the way you’d expect, and they tried to throw in a laughably hypocritical moral lesson about media violence. Gamer has no such intentions. It makes no apologies for the sexy, bloody carnage-fest that it is and it’s refreshing to see that the grit of Slayers is balanced out with the delightful absurdity of Society.

Society was a part of this film you had hints at in the trailer, but never really knew existed unless you followed the film’s viral marketing campaign (which I’m sure all of you did). It’s definitely the most interesting aspect of the film, and its scenes are the most surreal by a longshot.

You get to see a fat male playing as hot dude wearing a pig costume flirt with a different fat male playing as a hot girl wearing a pink wig and neon booty shorts. The entire place is cheerfully creepy, as a sex club/roller disco gets ravaged by machine gun fire, and the patrons only cheer when they get splattered by blood turned glow-in-dark by the blacklights. No, I doubt we’ll see these types of environments created in real life with magic mind-control tech, but once graphics turn photorealistic for good, and VR becomes all it’s been promised to be for the last fifty years? I predict a similar decline for society, and Gamer briefly touches on that sparkly, pulsating, apocalyptic vision of the future.

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“I’m a Barbie girl, in a Barbie worrrrrld…”

But sadly, this part of the film is nothing more than a sidenote, when it could have easily been its own feature. Instead we’re focused on Slayers which features all the gunfire and explosions you ever could want. The action is decently choreographed, and would be intense enough with typical shaky cam, but they’ve added a layer of static and digital fuzz to remind you that this is indeed supposed to be a video game, but it’s more headache inducing than anything else.

Gerard Butler certainly looks the part for a generic supersoldier, but most of the time, his character is as blank as a switched off android. Michael C. Hall in contrast is a maniacal idiot, and you wonder just how exactly someone certifiably insane could manage to get so rich. I was still debating his character right though the finale of the film, but once he participated in an elaborately choreographed dance routine with a troupe of prisoners, I was sold. Moments of absurdity like that are really the only thing saving Gamer from the abyss.

There are a surprising number of recognizable faces scattered throughout the rest of the film, and you feel like a lot of favors were called in. Kyra Sedgewick is a talk show host that serves no real purpose at all, John Leguizamo shows up as a fellow prisoner for all of five minutes and Milo Ventimigilia even pops up as a Society creepster. Aaron Yoo, Alison Lohman and Ludacris make up resistance group Humanz, and you have to wonder why the hell they’d cast Ludacris here as he plays a role that could have been filled by anyone, has all of six minutes screen time, yet casts the deadly “rapper-in-your-movie” shadow that should usually be avoided at all costs.

The pulse pounding action and destruction of Slayers and the Tokyo-pop, Fanta commercial stylings of Society is enough to make at the least the beginning of Gamer interesting, but once that wears out, the film fails to expand on any potential it had on discussing issues of technology and morality, instead replacing it with a typical revenge movie ending filled with more plot holes than Michigan highway. An interesting world was created here, and it had the potential to elevate this movie above nonsense and turn it into something fairly interesting. Sadly, it seems that you can give someone a hammer and nails and instead of building a house, they pin their hand to the wall. Better luck next time.

2 out of 5 stars

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Leonidas vs. Dexter? Sounds like a weird dream I had.

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