THE INFORMANT -- An Odd Bird of a Movie

THE INFORMANT is an odd mishmash of a movie. It tells the true story of Mark Whitacre, an employee of Archer Daniels Midland who turns into a whistleblower about price fixing in the corn business.

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Only that's not the whole story. Because Mark is a pathological liar. And a forger and embezzler, who stole millions from ADM while he was working to expose their wrongdoing. Matt Damon is great in the film, and there's a fine supporting cast including Scott Bakula and Joel McHale(!). The whole thing is ably directed by Steven Soderbergh. And the script by Scott Burns mostly achieves what it sets out to.

There are some intersting writerly choices, including having an almost omnipresent VO narration by Whitacre, chronicling a series of minutiae. This helps with the comic tone of the film, and sets the expectation that something's not entirely kosher with this guy. Unfortunately, because you're identifying with Whitacre, once it's clear that he's done something very wrong, there's no one to really carry the story forward. You're left coasting along to see how the whole thing pans out.

The FBI agents are really minor characters, so they don't carry the film. And you don't quite understand why Mark did the things he did since his explanations and reasoning constantly shift as he's caught in more and more lies.

The film also isn't quite clear about what exactly the whole price fixing situation is and why that's a crime per se. Why should it matter that we pay $.05 more for a box of cornflakes in six months? On a rational level, I understand that that's anti-competitive and could add up to millions in profit to ADM and its competitors. But does that make much of a difference in even the poorest person's life?

The film was co-produced by Participant, a label known for their socially conscious films. I guess that's to bring to light price fixing by big agribusiness concerns. Except that that's not really what this movie's about. The price fixing is really just an adjunct to the story of a man with some severe mental problems who ruins his life exposing some wrongdoing that in turn exposes all of the stuff he's done wrong.

In the end, although the film's enjoyable, it's really more of an exercise by Soderbergh in exploring a different kind of protagonist and a different kind of film. And in that way, it's more like BUBBLE or KAFKA or THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE than OCEAN'S 11 or OUT OF SIGHT.

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS - Sony Delivers a Great Animated Film

Apparently I'm one of about two people never to have read CLOUDY in book form. So I didn't know what to expect from the film.

SPOILERS RAINING DOWN LIKE GIANT PANCAKES

CLOUDY tells the story of Flint Lockwood, a wannabe inventor who can't ever seem to invent anything useful. While trying to invent a device that turns water into food, he accidentally launches it into the sky. Where it works. This attracts the attention from a cute wannabe weather intern-turned reporter, as well as the greedy mayor of the dying town. Flint becomes a hero and a bit stuck up, and the mayor repositions the town as an international tourist destination for its raining food. What Flint really wants is the respect of his misunderstanding fisherman father. Eventually, the machine mutates food to the point of self-awareness, and the world is about to be drowned under a foodstorm of epic proportions. Flint and a motley crew have to launch a sky-assault on the machine.

So -- how's the film stack up? Pretty darn good. The script, by directors Lord & Miller, is tight. There's enough character stuff to motivate all the action. There are fantastic gags with Flint's bum inventions, including ratbirds, a crazed TV with legs, and spray-on shoes, and the team behind the movie milks every last bit of humor and inventiveness out of raining food (from snowball fights with ice cream to a spaghetti twister).

There are a few weak points that stem from poor script choices. The TV producer/cameraman turns out to be a conveniently handy doctor/pilot/whatever. While this is played for jokes, it comes out of nowhere and takes away from the story a bit. And there are two instances in which Flint should fall to his death but doesn't, simply because the writers can't seem to come up with a good reason for him not to. In the first, he falls during the spaghetti twister, coming to rest on a series of parachutes/slides/whatever -- his labcoat opens like a parachute, then he catches an umbrella Mary Poppins-style, then he falls on some stuff, before finally climbing down a conveniently placed ladder to safety. Lord & Miller try to play it off for laughs, but it's really an instance of the script needing to show him doing something clever to save himself rather than lucking into it. Unfortunately, they repeat the same trick during the finale, in which Flynn falls out of the exploding food machine to his imminent death. Only for some reason, he's saved by a flock of ratbirds -- birds that up until now were nothing but a terrible nuisance.

These are relatively small flaws and don't detract from the otherwise tight plotting and solid character work. And the film looks great, with some truly impressive CG animation.

PONYO - Miyazaki's "Masterpiece"

Growing up dorky in the 1970s and 1980s, I was of course a huge fan of anime. Hayao Miyazaki is perhaps the best known anime director to come out of Japan, being called the Japanese Walt Disney. He's put forth some dazzling, brilliant films, usually about man's relationship with nature. PRINCESS MONONOKE, SPIRITED AWAY, AND HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE are all great films. PONYO is Miyazaki's latest.

POORLY DUBBED SPOILERS BELOW

PONYO tells the story of Sosuke, a little Japanese boy who lives with his mom and dad on an island. Dad's a fisherman, and often gone, so Sosuke and his mom are often on their own. Sosuke finds a young fish, Ponyo, while at the shore one day. But this is no ordinary fish -- she's the daughter of a sea wizard who maintains the balance of the oceans. Ponyo tastes Sosuke's blood after he cuts himself, and she yearns to be a real human. Her dad goes after her, and the oceans storm up. And then some other stuff happens.

The main problem with PONYO is that there's no story engine -- nothing driving the action. While it's nice to get beautifully animated images of fish-shaped waves and thousands of near-identical Ponyos swimming about or the gigantic Goddess of Mercy, without something moving the plot forward, it's all just empty spectacle. Miyazaki attempts to give the story some pep by having a "test of love" between Ponyo and Sosuke that the fate of the world depends on, but it literally boils down to the wizard asking Sosuke if he'll love Ponyo forever. To which (of course) he answer yes.

The mythology behind Ponyo, the sea wizard, and the goddess of mercy is also really muddled. Perhaps these are common myths that are know to every Japanese person. But I had no clue what was going on half the time.

In SPIRITED AWAY, the protagonist's parents are changed into pigs by an evil witch, and she has to go work for the witch in an enchanted bath house to figure out how to turn them back. In PRINCESS MONONOKE, a man has to figure out how to un-curse a princess turned into a demon. These are big events that have stakes and outcomes and clear paths from start to finish. Ponyo lacks that. It has cute characters and great animation, but that's about it.

WHITEOUT - An Apt Name for a Mistake of a Film

WHITEOUT is a thriller based on the Greg Rucka graphic novel. It tells the tale of a Federal marshal investigating the first murder in Antarctica. Good stuff. Aside from perhaps the vaguest and most misconceived ad campaign in the history of film (honestly, you have no idea what the movie is about, what genre it's in, or the fact that it's based on a graphic novel, just that it stars Kate Beckinsale and snow), WHITEOUT also has a pretty mediocre story and script.

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One of the film's biggest weaknesses is its arc and theme, which are both about trust. Carrie Stetko (Beckinsale) winds up in the dead post of Antarctica after a mishap, when she killed her partner who betrayed her. Now she doesn't trust anyone and has retreated from the world. So you'd think the film -- and the action sequences -- would be about her learning how to trust again. And that the lesson she learns will be integral in helping her solve the case. Not so much. In fact, the person she trusts most turns out to be part of the whole scheme behind the murder (surprise, surprise). And she never really learns much of anything about trust at all. This is a tremendous opportunity wasted.

One way to have fixed this is to have Carrie turn on her new partner from the UN, Price. She thinks he's part of the scheme or otherwise untrustworthy. And at a critical moment, she wounds him (could be shooting him, could be with a knife or ice-axe), resulting in an injury that plagues him the rest of the film. She learns that he is to be trusted, only now, he can't really help her out because the injury she inflicted on him slows him down. This would help in some of the critical scenes like the chase during the whiteout. And this would be a direct consequence of her trust issues -- they literally endanger her life.

Another weakness is the general stupidity of the bad guys' plot. They throw one of their wounded members out of an airplane. So his mangled corpse is found in the middle of nowhere, prompting a murder investigation from both the US Marshal Service and the UN. And since there are relatively few people in Antarctica, it's pretty easy to trace the victim back to the group of geologists he was working with. Common sense would dictate that the best thing to do would be for the bad guys to either drop the body down an ice crevasse somewhere or leave it inside the plane under the ice. Either way, they could just report the guy missing and nobody would ever find him.

The script also fails to maximize some inherent dramatic situations. There are some potentially cool chases outside the various ice stations. These are unique because the participants are battling the elements as well as each other. And they have to stay clipped into guide ropes to avoid getting lost in the snow. The first one, where Stetko is chased by the unknown bad guy, is great. But the film later repeats the chase. Which in itself is old hat, but is also undone a bit by the fact that one bad guy (with an ice axe) is chasing two armed law enforcement agents. Obviously, this reduces the threat substantially.

Likewise, Carrie loses two fingers on her right hand to frostbite. This is played for emotion, and we see she has a hard time buttoning her sweater. But it's never played for conflict or as an obstacle. An obvious place for this would be in showing how the wound affects Stetko's coordination in her gun hand. When she gets in the field and faces a bad guy, she literally can't shoot straight and her life is in danger for it.

Finally, it's far too obvious who the bad guys are. In the beginning, the film shows us Stetko has a contentious relationship with one of the pilots. By the time the story rolls around to talking about how the murder victim must have been tossed out of a plane, it's obvious who the pilot will be. Side note -- it's also completely unnecessary that the pilot turns out to be Australian and faking an American accent the whole time. Why? Presumably when he signed on for a lengthy Antarctica mission berth, he didn't know that he'd stumble upon a five-decades long lost Russian cargo plane carrying diamonds. This is a bit of unnecessary silliness.

And the film's big "reveal," that Stetko's beloved Doc is part of the evil cabal, can be seen coming a mile away. The main reason this reveal is telegraphed is that every single person on the base evacuates except for Carrie, her pilot Delphi, who has been stabbed and left for dead by the Australian pilot (and thus is not a suspect), Price, whom we've seen get attacked by the Australian pilot (and thus is not a suspect), and Doc. So since the movie's not over and Carrie still can't find the cargo, odds are 100% it's gonna be Doc behind it.

The script doesn't even bother to have a confrontation between Carrie and Doc. Doc just apologizes sort of and then wanders out in the snow to die watching the Southern Lights. Which is rather anticlimactic. And then for some reason, Stetko emails her boss withdrawing her resignation and requesting transfer to a warmer clime. Why? She still doesn't trust people. She didn't figure out who the bad guys were. And her best friend turned out to betray her (like the incident that scarred her in the first place).

The whole movie left me cold. Pun intended.

9 - Dance Ten, Looks Three (well, more like Looks Nine, Script Three)Shanek

Shane Acker's 9 came out, the story of ragdolls negotiating a post-Apocalyptic land and trying to avoid machine creatures bent on their destruction. The previews were amazing, full of incredible visuals. Sadly, the movie was all style no substance. No large surprise, being that it was produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmembatov.

9 OUT OF 10 SPOILERS BELOW

There's almost nothing to 9's script. It tells the story of ragdoll 9, who awakens in a post-Apocalytpic world. He finds others like himself, led by the fearful 1. Through some mistakes, 9 causes the capture of multiple other ragdolls and the reawakening of a giant evil machine. Eventually, he leads the ragdolls to overcome the machine.

Again, the visuals on the movie are awesome. The world is sufficiently disastrous and the residual iconography and flashbacks give a cool, retro-fascist vibe. The ragdolls move like real people and the monsters, all hybrids of ragdoll/bones/machinery are truly creepy.

Here's why the story doesn't really work.

1) It's far too simple. There's no subtlety or complexity. It's just a series of -- hey, we need to go here and do this. There aren't really even any complications. Just obstacles that are overcome.

2) The world doesn't make sense when you think about it. Why does a scientist imbue bits of his soul into ragdolls? And bits of his soul into the evil computer? Why not make more machines to fight the machine? Why do we care if the ragdolls survive? Do the bits of his soul ensure the survival of humanity? I'm not sure. All I know is at the end, some glowy soul-rain came down after the ragdoll-souls were released from the machine. That means what exactly?

Similarly, how do the ragdolls work? They don't have blood or bones. Yet they seem afraid of falling from heights. Why? Presumably they'd just smack into the ground and get up and be okay. The only thing that kills them is having their souls sucked out by the machine. So the rest of the sequences don't have much jeopardy to them because their "lives" aren't at stake.

3) 9 seems like an idiot. The whole movie pretty much revolves around him trying to undo the awakening of the great machine creature. Which for some reason he does. AFTER WITNESSING A MONSTER TRYING TO PUSH A SYMBOL INTO A DEVICE. This is perhaps the dumbest move of all time. In fact, after he does it, two of the other ragdolls ask him variations of "What were you thinking?" I don't know. Because it's a really stupid move. So trying to undo it doesn't seem heroic so much as a necessity, being that it was a move born of illogic/stupidity.

4) A lot of the tasks undertaken are far too easy. 9 and crew are able to trash the machine creature by using an old artillery piece (which is odd, since the machines were able to exterminate all of humanity, and humanity was incredibly well-armed) and getting the souls out of the machine just requires finding the symbol and pressing some buttons on it like a game of Simon. If that was the case, how did humanity lose the war in the first place?

Someday, someone will make an adult animated film that matches top-notch visuals with an incredible story. Well, someone who's not Japanese will make it. They've been doing those kinds of films for years.

THE BAADER-MEINHOF COMPLEX - Germanic Terrorist Angst

After a lackluster weekend of films, I was looking forward to Uli Edel's THE BAADER-MEINHOF COMPLEX, about the rise and fall of the Red Army Faction in Germany in the 70s. I enjoy films based on true stories and films about terrorism, so this was sure to be a winner. Right?

MEIN SPOILERS BELOW(en)

THE BMC starts out promisingly enough, giving us the daily life of Ulrike Meinhof, a German upper-middle class reporter, interspersed with the chaos of political protests in Germany in the 1970s. When German police kill a harmless protester, it starts a chain of events that results in the creation of a German terrorist group. Eventually, Ulrike leaves her husband and takes up with the terrorists, training in the Middle East and robbing banks and blowing up buildings. Eventually she and the other leaders are arrested, and new generations of the group spring up, resorting to worse and worse acts in order to try to free the leaders.

All good stuff. However, the film has some major problems, almost all due to the script. One, Ulrike hangs herself in prison about halfway to two-thirds through the movie. She's the character we've been identifying with -- we saw her husband cheat on her, how she couldn't stand by the sidelines when chaos and revolution were going on around her, how she left her children for her cause. So when she dies, there's no one to really identify with. Particularly because all the major characters are in jail at that point as well. So we're watching a jail/courthouse drama intercut with new terrorists doing some truly heinous things.

Two, there are far too many characters. This plagues a lot of films based on true events (like PUBLIC ENEMIES). The filmmakers are so concerned with being historically accurate that they forget about being clear or entertaining. There are dozens of terrorists, some of whom die, some of whom wind up in prison; and it's hard to sort them all out. Combining or cutting characters would've helped, and could've let us focus in on the motivations for some of the characters (like Baader) or the two lawyers who quit practicing law and start robbing and killing.

Three, as a corollary to the above, it's sometimes unclear who people are or why they're doing things. The new generations of terrorists assassinate a banker. I'm not sure why they did that. They also kidnap and later kill a man. I don't know who he is or why they wanted to kill him.

Four, ideology. In the film, the RAF grew up to protest German complacency in the US/Vietnam war (using bases to store/move men and materiel) and in the US/Israel effort. Part of this was national guilt from doing nothing in WWII. However, hearing constant references from Germans to supporting the PLO and other Mideast terrorist groups doesn't sit well; Israel may have done some terrible things in the 1960s and 1970s, but they were also fighting for their survival. And Germans going off on Israel sounds a little Hitler-esque, whatever their actual intentions were.

Five, the film shifts focus, from a sort of fast-paced crime drama to a courthouse drama. And the courthouse and jail scenes are long and boring. We don't know the details of their cases, and their hunger strikes and false accusations of murder (in Ulrike's suicide, for example) aren't particularly interesting to watch. We know that the remaining RAF members have weapons smuggled to them, but almost an hour goes by between the time they get weapons and they commit suicide with them. Why did we have to watch all the stuff that came between?

Six, it's a little hard to identify with people who are committing terrorist acts in the first place. It's a little more palatable when it's people who have a stake in the action, such as Palestinians who have been abused or had family members killed. Watching middle class Germans decide to murder in cold blood, bomb offices, or ask for a Mideast plane hijacking to support their cause isn't something most people can empathize with.

Next, some of the characters' actions aren't adequately explained. A friend decides to drop out of the group in Jordan while they're training with other terrorists. He offers to raise Ulrike's children for her. Not only does she decide to give her children up to a Palestinian orphan camp instead of letting this perfectly nice guy take care of them in Germany, but she and her comrades then try to have him murdered by telling the Arabs he's an Israeli spy. Why? Why did they hate this man so much? A lot of individual operations aren't explained either. We don't know who the targets are or why they're being targeted. Which just ends up confusing.

Finally, the film engages in a sort of fake suspense. The newer members of RAF engage in more violent crimes because of Ulrike's "murder." But it's pretty evident she hung herself -- she was depressed, she was in prison for life, she was marginalized by the rest of her former comrades, she even has a voiceover right before she does it where she says something to the effect of "I can't take it anymore." So we know she didn't kill herself. Then, the film tries to use this again at the end, after the other members commit suicide. And it's played as if it's a huge surprise to the terrorist members; which makes them seem stupid.

A shorter movie that wasn't so ambitious could have worked better. Focusing on Ulrike Meinhof's journey from journalist to terrorist to prisoner to suicide. It would've given us a central character we could identify with and a clear beginning, middle, and end.

ALL ABOUT STEVE, All About Eh

I made a cardinal mistake this past weekend. I'd read the script for ALL ABOUT STEVE a few years ago. I wasn't too impressed. And yet, looking for a movie over the long holiday weekend, the girlfriend and I settled on ALL ABOUT STEVE. If I didn't like the script, odds were, it wouldn't turn into a great movie all of a sudden (although that has happened twice -- MR. AND MRS. SMITH and LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE).

ALL ABOUT SPOILERS BELOW

ABS tells the story of crossword constructor Mary Horowitz (Sandra Bullock), a 30-something weirdo who lives with her parents. When her parents set her up on a blind date with news cameraman Steve (Bradley Cooper), she's instantly smitten and jumps him in his truck before they can even pull away from the curb. Steve realizes she's a bit odd, but not before politely telling her it's too bad she can't join him on the road. After she gets fired from her job for making an all-Steve crossword puzzle, she sets out to stalk her crush.

There are several obvious problems with the film/script. First, the movie plays out on one level throughout. Mary stalks Steve. She seems to like him solely because he's attractive. We know he doesn't like her -- he finds her annoying. So we're not rooting for the two of them to get together. We don't think Steve will ever come around to liking her, and he doesn't. He just warms up slightly from thinking she's a nutjob to thinking she's quirky. So the whole film's about Mary catching up to reality and learning that Steve's not the guy for her. Which everyone else seems to know from the start. Romantic comedies that work are about people we want to see get together overcoming difficult obstacles in order to wind up together. You have to root for the two of them as a couple. Here, we don't. We're not even supposed to.

There could have been some interesting ways to tweak the premise so the movie actually worked and held some mystery. You could've had Mary changing to attract Steve, and then realizing that she shouldn't have to change for love. But the movie just has her be her weird self throughout. Or, you could've done the movie from Steve's point-of-view, with him as the main character. He sleeps with a girl he thinks is great, and she turns out to be certifiable. She stalks him and puts his life and job in danger (one of the film's funny moments is when Steve mistakes a piece of a car for a machete and thinks Mary's trying to kill him). But the film doesn't really have Steve's job in danger, at least not from Mary. And we know Mary's not trying to kill him.

Second, there are no real obstacles to the film. Mary follows Steve around the country. She hits what could be an obstacle -- a hurricane, which trashes her car. But for some reason, even though the car's just flown a mile in the air, it's driveable. In fact, there are no obstacles at all until the very end of the movie, when Mary falls in a mine.

Third, Mary finds a group of weirdos whom she hangs out with and finds her place with. But they're such mutants, it's a little off-putting. One of them is DJ Qualls, usually cast when the filmmakers are going for a grotesque -- and he's made even weirder by the fact that he carves apples into faces for a living. Really? Mary may talk too much, but she's smart, and she's played by Sandra Bullock (even if she has awful clothes and a bad dye-job). Can't she find some non-freaks to feel at home amongst?

The film works in brief moments -- Mary falling in the well, the gag with the "machete," Thomas Haden Church screwing with Steve by continually telling Mary Steve's in love with her and wants her to follow him no matter what he might say to the contrary. But overall, there's nothing driving the story. Because it's a movie about a delusional woman coming to a very obvious realization -- that this isn't the man for her.

Oh, it's also not believable that a guy is going to blow off sex with an attractive woman just because she's talky. In order for a guy to really leave Sandra Bullock on the side of the road instead of schtupping her, she's have to have a penis or something. And still...

GAMER - Game Over for Originality, Logic

Having worked on 300 and seen the acting chops and personal magnetism of Gerry Butler first-hand, I'm definitely a fan. And I really enjoyed CRANK. From start to finish, it is what it is, a ridiculous, adrenaline-charged thrill ride that doesn't take itself or moviemaking seriously. So by the time your hero's rubbing up against an old woman to generate static electricity to keep his fake heart going or engaging in a fistfight as he falls out of a helicopter to his death, I was totally into it.

GAMER is the latest from writing/directing team Neveldine/Taylor. It stars Gerry Butler, Michael Hall, Kyra Sedgwick, and Alison Lohman. So it's not lacking for acting chops. While the idea's not the most original -- in the future, there's a real-life video game hybrid folks play by controlling death row inmates.; if you survive 30 battles, you're set free; the man who might achieve this is marked for death by the Bill Gates-like video game creator -- it's a good one that's worked before (THE RUNNING MAN, the newer version of DEATH RACE).

LEVEL UP FOR SPOILERS BELOW

Unfortunately, the movie pretty much starts and ends with its premise. The execution is sorely lacking. This is due to several factors.

1) There's no depth to any of the characters. Gerry Butler's a badass, the kid playing him is spoiled, Kyra Sedgwick's Oprah/reporter hybrid wants a story, Gerry's wife Amber Valetta is essentially a whore in a Sims-like game, there are some folks like Ludacris and Alison Lohman who want to stop Michael Hall because he's evil, and Michael Hall is evil. Everyone's a caricature. They don't even bother giving Gerry Butler's Kable an arc. You see in flashbacks that he's on death row for killing someone. The obvious thing to give his character some dimension is to have him be a guy who actually did bad and regrets it; he was a cop or an FBI agent who shot someone in custody due to a personal connection to the case. And it's the biggest mistake he ever made -- it landed him in jail, he's haunted by nightmares, it tore his family apart. And now, the only shot he has at getting out is by killing more people and butting up against that fear. That's some good personal conflict. The guy finds out he's good at killing people, and killing people could be his salvation, but it could also destroy his soul.

Instead, N/T opt for a cheesy and convenient backstory in which Gerry happened to be one of the original test subjects for the brain-controlling technology behind SLAYERS (the killing game) and SOCIETY (the sim game) and Michael Hall made him kill his friend as a test of the tech. Aside from being way too easy -- Hey, Kable's really a great guy and was set up all along! -- there's a major logical flaw here; namely, if Kable was part of an experiment that screwed with his brain and he killed someone while part of that experiment, wouldn't any credible lawyer be able to use that as an excuse or at least mitigating circumstances to get him off or get his sentence reduced from the death penalty?

2) The rules of the game itself aren't particularly clear. This leads to a host of confusion. A person can control a "slayer" through combat. If the slayer reaches a save point alive, he wins. And after 30 battles, you're supposedly set free (although no one's ever done it before). So if Kable's being controlled by Logan Lerman and the team's won 27 battles, why's Kable so great? If I pick up a video game controller and walk Master Chief through Halo 3 on Legendary difficulty, it's not a great accomplishment for my onscreen avatar. When I stop controlling him, he dies. The only attempt the film makes to answer this is a question a guard asks -- "Who aims? You or him?" (the answer, I'm the hands, he's the eyes). That doesn't really help.

Similarly, on the field of combat, there are obvious death row inmates, as well as a team of masked dudes who look suspiciously like the guards that later chase/fight Kable. Why would guards be fighting?

And Michael Hall's game includes basically NPC players who follow a series of scripted actions -- repeatedly crossing a street or purchasing goods -- in the middle of combat. This often leads to them dying horribly, since they don't have guns and don't have anybody controlling them. Now A) no one in their right mind would want to play the game as an NPC, even if they did only have to survive one game to be set free and B) let's assume for a moment that the world the movie sets up -- prison system going broke, this tech arrives, government settles on this as a solution to solve its penal system financial problem -- exists. Nobody would let live people get stuck in a game without a chance to fight and a high probability of dying.

Then there are little logic blips, like the fact that Michael Hall wants Kable dead so much he's setting a giant inmate with no controller out to kill him. But the inmate gets the drop on Kable and can't fire his gun because they're in a restricted area. Really? A Bill Gates type controls everything, including people (we later find out he's basically going to mind control all of society) but he can't override an automatic gun lock for two seconds?

Or why wouldn't Michael Hall just kill Kable if he really reprsented a threat to him in the first place? Or why is Kable a threat? The resistance (Humanz) goes after Kable because they somehow know that Kable was setup by Michael Hall. Which is weird, because they can't verify he's innocent until they hack into his brain and extract his memories. So Michael Hall wants Kable dead, but he doesn't just have a guard shoot him in the face in prison, and he fears him because he might escape and hook up with the resistance who will use previously unknown technology to see his memories? Um, okay.

Then you have Kable escaping the game once he gains control of his body. Michael Hall builds tech that can control your brain, and we've seen a prisoner try to escape jail earlier and get thrown a hundred feet in the air by some invisible force, and yet neither an invisible barrier nor some sort of shutdown procedure occur. A guy as smart as Michael Hall would probably have something in place in case someone escaped his game, like an auto-shutdown that paralyzes or knocks Kable out.

And finally, you've got Michael Hall with more money than Bill Gates and the smarts to implement this scheme and more (he's got nanotech in his head that can control the tech in everyone else's head and plans on unleashing the Nanex to everyone in society) and yet the security on his house is so crappy that Kyra Sedgwick can roll up and tap into some computer at his front door and broadcast Michael Hall and Kable's private conversation for everybody in the world to see? And Alison Lohman can hack into the Nanex network and hook Logan Lerman back up to Kable and have him kill Hall? Not to mention the fact that we've got yet another genius bad guy undone by his penchant for monologuing in front of the hero.

Neveldine/Taylor can shoot and cut the hell out of a movie. No matter what they do, you know it'll never be boring. Unfortunately, so far they've shown themselves to be far better directors than writers. They raise a bunch of interesting issues about control and power and video games and society, but due to the shallowness of the script, they all remain at surface level. Next time, they should let someone else do the writing and focus on the directing.