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).
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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.
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