Gamer (*)

Directed by: Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor
Starring: Gerard Butler, Amber Valletta, Michael C. Hall, Kyra Sedgwick, Logan Lerman, Alison Lohman, Terry Crews, Ludacris
Seen: October 24th 2009

* Out of ****

Gamer starts with a war scene. Not the Saving Private Ryan kind of war scene where you clearly understand what is transpiring, but rather a solidly confusing, shaky-cam, quick-edit, things and people exploding, supposed adrenaline rush. And the movie never lets off, even when the war ends. Now I do not mean this in a good or remotely complementing way at all. What I’m saying is that even though this is not a porn movie, it surely is movie porn. The entire movie feels like a protracted trailer for something featuring all the coolest and bestest ideas in the universe ever (from the perspective of a film-maker trying to shock teenage boys between the ages of 10 and 16 into submission and being evangelists for the movie, I guess).

Kable (Butler) is a convict who has been drafted into Slayers, a super-commercial and ultra-violent money-making scheme as a sort of unwilling participant. Death-row inmates compete, and will be released once they win 30 rounds of the game. Kable is on 27, and strongly progressing. The catch? Kable is controlled by Simon (Lerman), a 17 year-old gamer. Kable’s brain has been spliced with self-replicating nanites, which effectively gives him an IP-address, across which Simon (or any so-called owner) can control Kable. Ken Castle (Hall) created Slayers, as well as Society, and is now the richest (and most powerful) man on earth. Where Slayers is about the control of death-row inmates, Society is about people handing themselves over to be controlled by others in a SIM-type environment, but this is as shallow as the interaction you actually have in the game The Sims, as in the movie – as an example – a fat man (extremely grossly portrayed) controls a pretty lady, Angie Tillman (Valletta), and the things he has her do and allows to be done to her is uncomfortable to say the least.

Angie Tillman is Kable’s wife, and she goes through the mistreatment by the fat-man to experience what her husband goes through in Slayers, or so I suppose. When a group of free-radicals, called Humanz, liberate Kable from Slayers, it comes down to Kable and Humanz to liberate Angie from Society. Along the way the viewer is continuously confronted with background images of very liberally dressed and acting people, and after a while you can’t help but shut down and zone out. Somewhere in this convoluted mess the movie tries to address the larger issue of society losing the human connection through all our internet interaction, but that point gets lost in all the violence, lust, swearing, bad acting, bad filming, bad… downright everything. It gets ridiculously lost as a matter of fact. To be quite blunt, I’m going to stop discussing this disgusting movie right now and simply urge you to avoid it at all costs. It is terrible.