Gamer (2009)

Tagline: In the near future, you don’t live to play… you play to live.

Curiosity: It was helmed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the creative team behind the ridiculously awesome Crank series.

Plot: In a world where Sims and Halo aren’t good enough, peeps can log on to the Internet and play as REAL PEOPLE in games like Society and Slayers. While the people in Society are paid for having their brain cells replaced with a device that allows people to control them, Slayers participants are death row inmates given an alternative to execution. If they can survive 30 matches being controlled by nerds or one match as a non-playable character with a limited number of moves, they get pardoned. It’s all masterminded by wealthy programmer Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall). But not everybody enjoys his games, including John “Kable” Tillman (Gerard Butler), a Slayers soldier who knows that Castle rigs the game, and Ludacris as, uh, Ludacris (FACT: His character is never named, so I think it’s safe to assume it’s really him). If Kable can just get out, expose Castle, and reunite with his wife ‘n’ daughter… that would be nice.

Thoughts: I’m a pretty big Crank fan, but I couldn’t justify paying $10 to see Gamer in theaters, and renting it still feels like a waste of money. About three-quarters of the film consist of dialogue-free running, grunting, and exploding. The remaining quarter consists of Luda screaming stuff like “This is not a game” and “We are all slaves!” There’s so little acting involved that I can’t believe Hall and even Butler were given top billing. I’d argue that Kyra Sedgewick, as a money-minded muckraker, and Amber Valletta, as Kable’s wife, both get more to do, but whatever.

Gamer feels like a rough sketch of a final film. Plot points are quickly thrown out like a PowerPoint presentation, followed by lengthy scenes crammed with rapid cuts, hyper-violence, and hyper-sex. And then the ending wraps everything up with little explanation, as if Neveldine and raylor were like, “We’re about to break 90 minutes. Let’s just stop here.”

The duo does slip in some of their humor, like when a Slayer engages in tea bagging (video game humor!). I also thought Milo Ventimiglia’s cameo as Rick Rape, a Society character whose sole purpose is to hump everything, was pretty funny. Otherwise, though, Gamer feels like a straightforward action B-movie cribbing from other action B-movies, including, but not limited to, Death Race 2000 (and its remake), Rollerball (and its remake), and The Condemned (which, sadly, has not been remade yet). The Crank films bring a Looney Tunes mix of violence and humor that escalates them far above crap like Gamer, so I’m a little disappointed at what Neveldine and Taylor created. Still, though, I’ll give them a mulligan, at least until the inevitable Crank 3: FIRE AND BOOBS EVERYWHERE.

Reflection: Well... I like Gerard Butler as a person.