Gamer is written and directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the energetic team that also wrote and directed Crank and Crank 2, and seem to have too often re-watched movies like Death Race, Rollerball, Surviving the Game, The Running Man, and Memento, to name a few that clearly had a heavy influence on their latest effort. Not that that’s a bad thing, of course. Gamer is a highly entertaining thrill ride with a fun, if not exactly unique, sci-fi twist that keeps the proceedings moving along at a fast clip. Gerard Butler, who played a convincing temptation-driven chauvinist in The Ugly Truth, is back to the kind of action- and violence-laden role that seems to suit him best.

The movie explores the parallel worlds between fact and fiction, blurring the line between them and turning a man-made, alternate reality into such a tangible existence that it is literally full of real, living breathing people. Neveldine and Taylor have gone on record describing how the movie is “more Kubrick than Neveldine/Taylor, at times,” and that “It’s about ideas. But it’s also got bigger action set-pieces.”

Yeah, whatever guys. Reminds me of a sign I once saw in front of a seedy motel in Vegas that said “Highly recommended by owner.” Gamer is a fun and well-made action sci-fi film, but I think it might be best not to try too hard to impose too much philosophical depth to it.

Choose your player...

The story – a reclusive billionaire named Ken Castle has taken the gaming world by storm with his virtual reality video games, which have become so globally famous that he became the richest man in the world, passing Bill Gates practically overnight. In his latest game, Slayers, real world people can pay money to control real humans inside the artificial environment known as Society, and other real world people can get paid to be those living in Society and letting others control them.  Death in the game means real life death for the man/woman playing your character, so needless to say, there will be a desire for escape, the possibilities of which will be strenuously explored by our hero, Kable (Gerard Butler).

Now, I won’t go into detail about how the controlling works. Suffice it to say that Castle came up with a way to turn a person’s entire brain into a receiver for radio control signals. You can see the significance of the lyrics of Marilyn Manson’s cover performance of “Sweet Dreams.”

You can see the appeal of Slayers to geeky teenage boys.

But who would take a job that could potentially result in their own deaths in this manner? As fully supported by the U.S. Government, it’s death row inmates that are placed in the game, with the condition that if they survive 30 sessions of the game, they win their freedom. You see now how you can take the plots of Surviving the Game and Death Race and you have this movie. And I love the logic, by the way. Put our most violent criminals in this game with real people, weed out the weak ones who will be killed off, and release the most hardened criminal warriors that survive 30 game sessions back out onto the street. Like 2008’s Death Race, a more interesting sci-fi movie exists in the society around what we see here. Personally, I want to know more about whoever’s President.

Kable's wife, Angie, an unwilling participant in Slayers.

But even though the movie might bear a little too much resemblance to a lengthy list of past films, it also has so much visual style that it is pretty easy to forget about that. There are times in the movie where it literally feels like you’re wandering through some of the deepest and most bizarre areas of the male psyche, and the things that they come up with and throw on screen reminded me of some of the crazy stuff that Tarsem Singh came up with in The Cell.  If nothing else, the movie is a visually arresting piece of eye candy, although it should be noted that it has pretty much exactly the same nearly all-male target audience of the Crank films.

One of my only real complaints about the movie is that I wish they had done something different with the character of Kable, a real life hero framed by the big bad businessmen for a crime he didn’t commit, hence his death sentence. Such a structure is as old as the sci-fi hills, and therein lied one of the movie’s greatest chances to do something new and original.

Flying dumptrucks? Sure, why not?

Nevertheless, the story never slows down and the performances are outstanding, although with the possible except of the horribly miscast Alison Lohman, who was brilliant in Tim Burton’s Big Fish (as well as Sam Raimi’s surprisingly scary Drag Me To Hell earlier this year) but looks ridiculous here in cyber-punk dreadlocks. But Michael C. Hall, on the other hand, who plays the game’s creator, Ken Castle, inhabits his character completely and gives such a unique performance that he steals the show whenever he’s onscreen. He does a show-tune performance near the end of the movie that is one of the entire film’s best scenes. Ludacris also gives a spot-on performance in a key role. This guy is one of our best musicians-turned-actors.

Let the gaming begin...

Most importantly, Neveldine and Taylor understand that pesky things like physics and other reality-based inconveniences don’t apply to video games, and hence do not apply to the world created in Society. In the hands of competent action directors, this makes for endless special effects opportunities, as well as a great excuse for throwing in a lot of gratuitous nudity without coming across as derivative, probably because one of the movie’s central themes is about how modern American media is overflowing with sex and violence. And what better way to comment on that than to make a movie that attempts to reach the saturation point of sex and violence?

Maybe you can see why I doubt the sheer philosophical depth of the film, but it would be unwise to say the movie’s inaccurate, and I think wrong to say it’s not entertaining. It’s action for action’s sake, and at the very least, in that way Neveldine and Taylor have never promised anything different from what they delivered. Game on!

The Bean Meter

4 Beans out of 5.