MOVIE REVIEW: GAMER

GAMER

Two of Seven Cows

Some bad movies contain within them the germ of a good idea, which is a shame. Some ideas are novel enough that they can only be used once. If the filmmakers blow it, well, that idea is gone for good. Any director with the skill to do it right has their own ideas, and presumably too much integrity to steal someone else’s.

            

 Gamer is just such a movie. Taking place in the near future, video games have merged with the reality TV craze creating a hybrid called Slayer where players control actual humans in a violent warlike televised game. The “gamers” are death-row inmates who can win their freedom with thirty victories. Not a bad idea, and in the right hands might have been both thrilling and a good canvas for some poignant social commentary.

            

 No such luck.

            

 Gamer is relentlessly unpleasant to watch. Dark grey hues, shaky cameras, dehumanizing imagery, and ugly, ugly characters in casually grotesque scenes leave the filmmakers a high hurdle to jump. Without over-the-top thrills and social commentary worth commenting on, all you have is an ugly film. Well, in the final analysis all you have is an ugly film.

            

 Gerard Butler and Michael C. Hall are okay in the roles they’re given, but their characters are wafer-thin and not terribly interesting. Amber Valletta is so misused in her role as Angie, the love interest that it hurt just to watch her.

            

 If there was anything that I liked about this movie, it was the coupling of casual vulgarity with casual violence. I do believe that a society that ignores the most basic of civilities is on a slippery slope that ends with a society that ignores violence and murder. Primitive urges always lead to a death-spiral if unchecked; that’s why we invented civilization, I imagine. It was easy for me to believe, then, that in a fictional world where newscasters use vulgarities in a casual manner the sexual and violent exploitation of others for sport is taken for granted. Reread this paragraph, then, and consider yourself amply warned and in no need of watching Gamer to get this thin sliver of wisdom.

            

 It does seem that the makers of Gamer knew their grand idea wasn’t panning out as it mercifully ends before the ninety-minute mark. This is a bad movie, so bless them. I give it two cows, and that’s being generous. Yuck.