Gamer

Man, it’s been two weeks since I’ve written a review, so bear with me I’m not on top of my game. To those wondering why I didn’t review anything last week, the answer is the choice to not review anything was my actual review (did I just blow your mind?). Now that I’m back doing real reviews, I’m given the task of reviewing Gamer, the latest from crazy s.o.b.’s Neveldine/Taylor, a movie that really doesn’t lend itself to reviews.

Gamer is basically a remake of Death Race or The Running Man or any other movie with the overused plot of death row inmates involved in some crazy killing game that allows them to eventually earn their freedom. This game is called Slayers, and in it, people have the ability to control the death row inmates (through mind control technology, of course) in a free-for all shootout. Is it a great plot? No, but I loved what N/T did with the first two Crank movies, and this plot seemed like the perfect vehicle for them to blow everything up on a large scale.

What I got instead was a slow, boring, poorly shot film that at times took itself way too seriously, which is a shame, because one of my favorite things about N/T is that they don’t take themselves seriously at all (or so I thought). Gamerfollows Kable (Gerard Butler) who you know is a bad-ass because he spells his name with a K. Butler delivers another very solid performance. The guy deserves to be an action star who does Clive Owen like roles, not Jason Statham roles. Michael C. Hall’s performance has not been received well and I really disagree with that. If you just his performance as compared to performances in real movies, then it’s not good. But if you judge it for being in a N/T movie, it was exactly what I wanted. It was deliciously over the top, with Hall just hamming up his southern accent the entire time. There’s a slew of other actors who were in the movie for about two seconds, which was really strange, but to me, the best of them was Milo Ventimiglia as Rick Rape. With a name like that, I really don’t have to explain the character.

I still maintain that the framework to an awesome action movie was there. There are three slayer sequences, which should have ranked in the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen, but instead rank in the most boring action set pieces I’ve ever seen. They’re not shot well, and there is never any sense of tension or conflict, which I wouldn’t mind, if they had been out of control, which they weren’t. This may sound strange, but the violence just wasn’t gratuitous enough for me. Whenever there was violence, especially in the beginning, it was connected to slayers, and therefore part of the plot. Never did we get a scene where I thought, “that action doesn’t need to be here” or “that violence is too much” and the problem is I wanted to think that.

My biggest gripe with the movie was that it tries for serious themes and emotions, and that’s just not something that N/T can do, or something that people want from a N/T movie. There were aspects of the movie that were super weird (namely an entire section of the movie known as “society”) and they were awesome. It was exactly what I wanted out of the movie. The aforementioned Rick Rape could have been classic if the movie around him wasn’t so mundane. I even bought into the song and dance sequence that proceeds the climax (a climax which really sucked, I might add), and no one else in the world seemed to have liked that.

As much as I went to the theater wanting to love this movie, I can’t even go as far as to recommend anyone see it. Gamer promises us action and uber-weirdness but delivers us boring set pieces and just basic weirdness. The morale of the story is, don’t ever see anything Ludacris is in (Luda!). That rule never fails.