Reviewed by Justin Bateman
Stars Gerard Butler, Michael C Hall, Amber Valletta,
Logan Lerman, Ludacris | Written by Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor
UK cert 18 | UK RRP £19.99 | Runtime 91 minutes | Directed by Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor
It’s the not-too-distant future and Ken Castle (Hall) is the richest man in the world thanks to his ground-breaking technology. For Castle has created the ultimate in gaming, inventing self-replicating nanites which are injected into the brain and enable real life people to be controlled by gamers who pay for the privilege. Other people are paid to ‘act’ in a virtual world called Society, while in the latest incarnation, Slayers, prisoners on death row ‘play’ in shoot ‘em ups. If they can survive 30 games, they are given the full pardon and released from prison.
No one has even got close to this magic number until an inmate known as Kable (Butler) starts getting close. He and his controller, a 17-year-old gamer called Simon (Lerman) are world famous but on the verge of Kable’s historic final game a group of activists called Humanz do some techy infiltration bizzle, broadcasting that Castle is planning to control everyone in the world using his nanites.
If you’re fed up with seeing big screen adaptations of computer games because inevitably they have no real story then this might prove to be a welcome change. Because for all its faults, Gamer does have a coherent plot and some decent ideas. Sure, they’re very much of the moment and for many people watching a film about people playing games is even lower down on their to do list than actually playing one in the first place. But simply in terms of narrative, Gamer works.
Where it falls down mainly is in character. Butler proves himself to be a charisma vacuum, a grunting, sweating soldier and for all his strife it’s impossible to care about him or his situation. Michael C Hall is good enough as the megalomaniac geek but everyone else’s character is one dimensional and not remotely memorable. The action sequences are efficient, violent and blood-spattered and it all looks like something from MTV, which is either a good or a bad thing, depending on your inclinations.
So while Gamer has a certain style which will undoubtedly appeal to some, for the rest of us this is largely a ragbag of action film clichés and even clichés of gamers themselves, with an almost complete lack of soul, subtlety or wit. Maybe that’s missing the point (this is from the makers of Crank, after all) but it doesn’t make it any better a film. Forgettable.
EXTRAS ** Cheat Codes – 40 minutes of talking heads including the cinematographer and the editors discussing certain scenes, most of which is pretty tedious; Inside The Game: Controlling Gamer – an hour-long documentary on how the film came to be made from the producers and directors as well as interviews with all the leading cast members. This is more interesting and insightful, probably because these people are more used to being interviewed but it's still hardly groundbreaking stuff.