Gamer

What’s cool about Gamer is that it holds elements that are true to the Sims, MMORPG, Second Life experience. Every FPS player, MMO dabbler and anonymous degenerate can feel at home in the world of Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall). We are given the ultra-futuristic computer experience where the 3rd dimension pushes into the 4th and polygons are replaced by real, living, breathing human beings. Imagine playing Call of Duty 4 knowing that your player is a real person who will actually die if you walk into enemy fire. Imagine playing Playstation Home and controlling a hot avatar that can easily get some “strange” in the corner of the movie theater. What Gamer does is it shows us our anonymous, internet world if we were to go as far as to control reality.

Kable (Gerard Butler) is a convicted felon and the only death row inmate to have survived over 28 matches in the real FPS game “Slayers”. The game, set up by multi-billionaire genius Ken Castle, allows a player to take the reigns of an inmate turned soldier in a battle royale for their freedom. If an inmate wins 30 matches they can walk free, the only problem is that most inmates don’t make it to 10. Castle whose success came in the form of a realistic version of Second Life where people volunteer to be controlled by players in a party atmosphere. The outline of the movie is to follow Kable as he tries and make it to that 30th game.

Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor brought us a different form of action in Crank and the even crazier Crank: High Voltage, if you aren’t a fan of those, chances are you will absolutely hate this. For me, this type of movie is the Mad Max of our time period, Death Race on an acid trip and with the fan-service to gamers it may be a cult classic waiting to happen. There are many cameos in the movie, not limited to John Leguizamo, Terry Crews (yes he dances in this one too, sigh), Zoe Bell and Milo Ventimiglia as the awesome Rick Rape. Kyra Sedgwick plays a convincing cougar-type and Amber Valletta is sexy.

If I was to gripe about anything it would be the similarities with Death Race and the way the story wrapped up. It felt as if they wrote the final scenes while filming and didn’t give any thought to the huge gaping plothole and questions it left in my mind. Don’t I hate it when they do that! The music was on point ranging from explicitly sexy rave tunes to classy Sammy Davis Jr. and the cinematography was much like Crank, though I felt the Space-Aged monochromatic look in the prison shots was a bit much.

This would be a good rental or a gift for an MMO player or an FPS fanboi but for average movie guy, stay far away. Still it’s good to see King Leonidas back in the action again, as he was in RocknRolla. I look forward to the next installment.