Movie Review: Gamer (2009, Neveldine/Taylor)
Directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, 2009, 95 minutes, Starring Gerard Butler, Michael C Hall, Ludacris, Kyra Sedgwick.



There really is no way around it, but Gamer is quite simply, a bad movie. The film starts off with an interesting, albeit unoriginal, idea, before it tosses it in the dirt, kicks it, shoots it in the face and quickly leaves it for dead. In a subgenre of movies that ranges from the excellent Battle Royale (2000) and the terrible The Condemned (2007), Gamer unfortunately sits closer to The Condemned. It is uninspired and seems bored in its unoriginality, if not its plot, the rest of us are.

Kable (Gerard Butler) is an international sensation in Slayers, a game where the players can play a death row inmate in a series of battles via a chip implanted in the brain; if an inmate survives the course of thirty battles, then said inmate can go free, no strings attached, except for Kable is the only inmate to have ever come close to those thirty games, with three left to go. Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall) is the billionaire who started Slayers (along with its “mother game”, Society, where instead of death row inmates and battles a player can control an everyday citizen who signed up for the game), but as it (unfortunately) turns out, Castle has more heinous attentions afoot. After Kable is able to escape from his last game, much mayhem insues.

The first and foremost problem with this film is its plot. The first forty minutes were actually fairly decent, the action was manic, the acting was half-assed but it was entertaining; if only the film had expanded that forty minutes and threw out the rest. Once Kable escapes Slayers, the film quickly descends into stupidity. The films tone suddenly changes from high octane action to boring chase to, well I don’t really know, the films switches around so much that by the end you don’t really care anymore. If you thought the film was rediculous before Kable left the game, you’ve seen nothing yet; you know it’s bad when during a crucial scene between Butler’s Kable and Hall’s Castle you think,

“So what are we going to do today Dexter?”
“The same thing we do everyday Spartan, try to take over the world.”

The acting is universally mundane. It makes no sense to me, Gerard Butler is a decent actor who has a great scene presence, yet here he looks as bored as we are. Nearly everyone in this movie takes the film was too seriously, the two notable exceptions being Segdwick and Hall, with only the latter coming out the better. Sedgwick looks more like she was picking up a decent sized check then trying, and Alison Lohman’s hair speaks more then she does, not in a good way.

Another of the films problems is the varying, clashing styles it presents. From the gritty greys of the Slayers game to the over-the-top, ludicrous, bright color scheme of the Society game to same odd mix of the two for the real world segments. The only one of these that really works is the grey Slayers game, the real world being rather boring and the Society world being grotesque and more then slightly stupid.

The film hits its low point with the ending, the plot finally twisting itself into oblivion and the film utterly collapsing in on itself. There were some laughs to be had, the scene where the morbidly obese gamer tosses a tray of waffles at his dozen or so television screens, classic. Also, is it sad when a straight laced Lionsgate action films best scene involves Michael C. Hall in an interpretive dance number?

* ½ out of ****