Gamer (2009)

After sitting through a lousy movie about a puzzle maker (All About Steve), I suffered through Gamer, a terrible movie about futuristic video games, and I wondered if I’d been transported from the movie theater into a toy store from Hell. I like games in general, but movies about games (The Game, for example) or based on games (Clue, or anything directed by Uwe Boll) tend to really suck. Gamer is no exception.

In fact, Gamer is merely a ripoff (with better computer graphics) of another bad game movie, the 1987 Schwarzenegger “classic” The Running Man. I can’t believe I’m actually defending that film in comparison to another, but at least it had Richard Dawson playing the villain, in an interesting casting choice. This time it’s Michael C. Hall (TV’s Dexter) as a ridiculously twangy-voiced computer megalomaniac named Ken Castle, who has surpassed Bill Gates in riches and fame thanks to his nanotechnology that enables stereotypical couch potatoes and teenage video geeks to control the movements and actions of other humans in two different scenarios: “Society”, a Sims-esque creation where all the real-life Gamers dress like they’re in a 20-year-old Deee-Lite music video and either go to raves or stand around in a public square, things their slovenly at-home controllers apparently would never do themselves due to lack of real social skills; and “Slayers”, where players control death-row inmates in a live version of first-person shooter games like Halo and Call Of Duty. If the inmate can survive 30 “missions”, he’s set free. Of course, nobody has reached that goal, but “Kable” (hunk du jour Gerard Butler) only has four more to go as the film begins.

Kable, wrongly convicted and seeking to regain his wife and child (much like the first half-hour of Gladiator, in a weakly obvious attempt to humanize this one-dimensional character), is controlled by a rich, spoiled teenage dweeb named Simon (Logan Lerman), and is a worldwide ratings draw for both Castle and an irritating talk-show host (Kyra Sedgwick). Kable and Simon are eventually aided in their efforts to “beat the game” by an underground gang of hackers and vintage arcade-game collectors (I kid you not), led by Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, who is the most interesting actor in the cast until he’s unceremoniously killed off without even a decent death scene. Which is all the more shocking considering how completely gratuitous the rest of this movie truly is.

For instance, there are so many profanities in the dialogue they sound awkward and unnatural, as though they’re just there to make the movie sound “tough”. Zoë Bell, the stuntwoman star of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, appears as another inmate to make us think there’s gonna be some female kickassitude on screen, until her head is literally blown off within only a couple of minutes of her showing up. John Leguizamo is similarly wasted, literally and figuratively, in another minor role. Meanwhile, we get lots of shaky-cam photography, ADHD-inspired editing that lacks any continuity or coherence, blatantly obvious green-screen shots, blood splattering everywhere, and Gerard Butler wishing he had half the range and screen charisma of Clive Owen or Russell Crowe. Butler’s most dynamic moment here is when he pukes up a bottle of vodka. Seriously.

And here’s the real kicker, the moment that made this movie descend to the depths of utter cinematic stupidity: After 90 minutes of blood and grime and explosions and gunfire and computer graphics, when Our Hero finally confronts Our Villain in his lair, what does Our Villain do? A SONG-AND-DANCE NUMBER! Honest to God! With a finger-snapping chorus line of killers! I swear, this moment may rank alongside Showgirls as the most laughable big-screen ineptitude since the days of Ed Wood. And that comes BEFORE the “Before I Kill You, Mister Bond…” speech that always occurs in tripe like this.

Gamer was written and directed by two talentless hacks who are trying to be “hip” by only using their last names in the credits, much like the Wachowski brothers did on The Matrix movies. I won’t add to their glory or buzz by repeating their names here. Suffice to say, they deserve to retreat back into World Of Warcraft or some other fantasy realm, because based on this dreck, they sure can’t make anything of substance in the real world. The old Atari game Pitfall was more entertaining than this worthless flick.