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Not a joyless disaster, but disappointing

Posted : 11 years, 2 months ago on 4 January 2013 03:56

"Kable's the perfect soldier. He's a tactical killing computer. His only vulnerability is the nanex itself; the ping, the delay between Simon's commands and Kable's ability to execute."

Gamer is essentially the Death Race of the videogame world, topped off with a hint of social satire and filtered through the distinct filmmaking lens of Crank masterminds Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. There is a sci-fi twist, however - the gamers of the story do not control artificial avatars in a computer-generated environment, but are instead given full control over real flesh-and-blood human beings. To be sure, Gamer excels when it's locked in frenetic action mode, but the flick is less successful whenever the bloodshed halts, with the half-baked narrative leaving a lot to be desired.



In an unspecified future, virtual reality videogames are enormously popular. Owned by wealthy media mogul Ken Castle (Hall), the videogame Slayers lets players control the body of a death row inmate who's sent into a hellish warzone. The condemned prisoners volunteer to participate in the game, as they are promised their freedom if they survive 30 rounds of violent warfare. One warrior named Kable (Butler) is getting close to earning his freedom, with only a few rounds left to survive before he can return to his family. Knowing that Castle will not easily let him go, Kable asks the gamer who's controlling him, Simon (Lerman), to set him free during a battle. Staging an escape, Kable sets off to find his wife Angie (Valletta), who's a participant in Castle's other virtual reality game, Society. Helping Kable is a controversial group of hackers who called themselves 'Humanz'.

Neveldine and Taylor's script for Gamer is more ambitious than their efforts on the Crank movies. It's a satire which explores society's current love affair with both reality television and interactive videogames like The Sims, World of Warcraft and Second Life. Gamer also recognises that, when online, gamers can become anyone that they want thanks to internet anonymity. This is emphasised by the fact that Kable's attractive wife is seen being controlled by a disgusting fatty. The satire is easy and obvious, to be sure, but it is amusing, and it affords the film some sense of thoughtfulness. Unfortunately, Gamer carries the earmarks of a motion picture that was mangled in the editing room. The film is lean and mean at around 90 minutes in length, leaving no room for any meaningful dramatic growth. Admittedly, this facilitates effective narrative momentum, but it leaves the picture feeling underdone, with the huge cast of familiar faces (Alison Lohman, Keith David, Terry Crews, Ludacris, Milo Ventimiglia and John Leguizamo are all here) all stuck in thankless supporting roles, indicating that they might have formerly been part of a beefier story.



Gamer is at its best whenever the Slayers competitors enter the combat arena. Visually, the film is a home run; the world of Slayers is excellently-designed, with fantastic abandoned environments a perfect setting for plenty of awesome destruction marshalled by veteran action directors Neveldine and Taylor. The action set-pieces peppered throughout the flick are never short of spectacular. Although the photography is often shaky and the editing is a bit on the rapid side, it's still possible to discern what's happening, and the results are enormously exhilarating. As Gamer was shot with Red One cameras, it looks gorgeous and crystal clear, proving that digital photography is here to stay. Also impressive is the depiction of the other virtual reality game, the Sims-like Society. It's a bright, colourful and stylised world of sex, drugs, wigs and dated fashion.

Predictably, acting is terribly average on the whole, with none of the performers projecting enough gravitas or intensity to make for a proper central anchor to latch onto. Gerard Butler gives it his all, but the material renders him forgettable, as his character has no substance to speak of and Butler is just left to spout generic action movie speak. Michael C. Hall (TV's Dexter) embraced the chance to play the villain here, hamming it up to extremes. At one stage he even does a flamboyant song and dance number, for crying out loud. The rest of the cast is strictly 'meh'; Lohman is attractive but unremarkable, Leguizamo has exactly nothing to do, Crews gets an extended cameo at best, and so on.



In final analysis, Gamer is enjoyable as a switch-your-brain-off action fiesta (especially with the R-rated levels of carnage) but it's also frustrating. Neveldine and Taylor introduce a number of interesting concepts and ideas, but they are at odds with the generic storytelling. It's as if Philip K. Dick mapped out the broad strokes, but the fine details were filled in by much less sophisticated writers. Still, Gamer is not the joyless disaster that critics seem to have dismissed it as. Yes, the film could've been a profound sci-fi masterpiece if it ventured deeper below the surface, but it has a bucket-load of excellent action sequences and the hyper-kinetic style ensures that the picture is never boring.

6.5/10



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Gamer review

Posted : 11 years, 9 months ago on 2 July 2012 04:36

I like Gerard Butler. I like Michael C. Hall. I like John Leguizamo. I do not like this film.
Gamer is not an original film, it throws together some good ideas from some really good films - The running man, Battle royale and Tron to name a few - but poor story telling, bog standard acting and silly visuals means this offering falls flat on it's face. Don't get me wrong, if you like to see blood, guts,'epic frags' and faces smashed to a pulp then you are gonna jizz all over this, but if you like your mindless violence with a bit of substance you will probably have a lazy lob-on throughout.


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An average movie

Posted : 12 years, 6 months ago on 17 September 2011 02:53

I wasn’t really sure what sure what to expect from this movie but I have always been a sucker for this kind of flick dealing with a futuristic game. First of all, I was quite surprised to see such a really nice cast involved (Gerard Butler, Amber Valletta, Michael C. Hall, Kyra Sedgwick, Logan Lerman, Alison Lohman, Terry Crews, Ludacris, Milo Ventimiglia, John Leguizamo) and I thought that they all gave some decent performances, especially Gerard Butler who was a perfect choice for this part. Furthermore, the movie looked great with some cool action scenes and I thought that they managed to create a convincing futuristic world. However, the end result was still rather flawed. First of all, as said before, there was an impressive cast but actually none of those characters were properly developed. Furthermore, the whole complot thing was rather boring, unoriginal and not really interesting and I wish they spent more time showing the impact of those new games on our society but they obviously chose to spent most of the running time on some badass action scenes. To conclude, in spite of flaws, I thought it was still a  well made futuristic action movie and I think it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.



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Gamer review

Posted : 13 years, 4 months ago on 16 November 2010 09:08

GAMER - Em um futuro revolucionário, um videogame on-line é a grande sensação. Nele, internautas manipulam prisioneiros de verdade em um jogo de vida ou morte. Mas um dos prisioneiros tentará vencer o jogo e derrubar o sistema para se ver livre.


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UGH

Posted : 13 years, 5 months ago on 14 October 2010 02:20

Out of curiosity, I watched Gamer. Wish I didn't. Right off the bat it was very dismal..ok I can live with that. However the idea of this gaming world for disgusting fetishes, sexual pleasures and violence is very screwed up. I believe the directer/writer's failed to portray this idea as being BAD. Almost praised at some points. A lot of swearing and the violence wasn't even that good.

Likes: One fight scene and that's about it. Nothing to like in this film.

Overall a very disappointing and messed up film. One to stay away from, unless you enjoy gross stuff..then go for it.

2/10


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Gamer review

Posted : 13 years, 9 months ago on 14 June 2010 01:34

promising premise, but typical hollywood action/thriller for underdeveloped brains.


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Very Disappointing

Posted : 14 years, 4 months ago on 30 November 2009 02:30

In this massive multiplayer online role-playing game, a gamer's avatar is another human being and death is permanent.

The premise behind Gamer is an interesting one. In this future world, people can give up control of their bodies to someone else and this notion is at the same time seductive and horrific.
But Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor are more concerned with gory violence, titillation and being offensive than digging deeper into the themes of free will and dealing with society's "rejects".

Gerard Butler plays Kable, the star of the "Slayers" game, the only prisoner on death row who has survived 28 of these sessions. If he can finish 2 more games he will earn his freedom but Kable is more interested in getting revenge on the people who put him there.
Even though the script doesn't give Butler much to do but look intense, he still manages to make Kable sympathetic and honorable.
Michael C. Hall as the technological wunderkind who developed the game and it's tamer (relatively speaking) counterpart "Society" is predictably evil and nothing more.

Much of the action is intense and violent and prone to migraine-inducing shaky camera effects and quick cut editing to simulate a first-person shooter scenario.
All this action gets a bit too much - there's nothing for your eye to focus on to give you breathing room during all this intensity.

Don't get me started on how much women are objectified in Neveldine and Taylor's world - sending a female "avatar" to be raped is just not cool in any book.

Gamer becomes more interesting in the last 20 minutes with Kable seeking revenge. One scene before the climatic mano-a-mano fight which involves the song "I Got You Under My Skin" is the best thing about the movie.
This movie ultimately feels like 90 minute techno-metal music video dedicated to gratuitous violence.


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Control or be controlled...

Posted : 14 years, 5 months ago on 4 October 2009 05:10

''...Kable's the perfect soldier. He's a tactical killing computer. His only vulnerability is the nanex itself; the *ping*, the delay between Simon's commands and Kable's ability to execute...''

Set in a future-world where humans can control other humans in mass-scale, multi-player online gaming environments...

Gerard Butler: Kable

We see many types of futuristic films mixed with an action-packed revenge bad guy theme. In this regard Gamer is no different from previous projects which have preceded this venture. For it's strengths it has some interesting ideas and moralistic questions of how free will and control can be applied to human beings on a large scale. Death Race, a similar film released a couple of years ago, also had an entertainment spin on violence, criminals and racing. Gamer is a sort of virtual version of the former, being one of action, carnage and perhaps lacking originality in places but making up for that with new ideas in others.

The whole concept gels well because Gamer also has a tightly knitted cast of strong players. Gerard Butler being the star attraction of the whole affair, Michael C. Hall the villian mastermind, and Logan Lerman as Simon the kid controlling Butler's Kable star of the game 'Slayers'.
Acting wise it is weak on various scenes, which is unfortunate because other scenes are well executed.
The actors weren't bad, but they were given little to work with. Butler was extraordinarily limited with few lines, I realise he's capable of so much more emotion than he showed here, so even his most poignant scenes were apparently stripped of almost all feeling by the directors. Sedgwick was so exaggerated as a character that she was stereotypically robotic, so much so that her character didn't gel with all the other characters she got into contact with. Can Valeletta act? I have no idea because she really didn't act at all here nor did it appear that she was supposed to.
As for Ludacris he was simply ludicrous in this, his acting talent non-existent. I mean not all black people talk like home boys, and this let down the film slightly.

''I hope one day to have the opportunity to breach your firewall, Miss Parker Smith.''

Gamer was written and directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor(Crank). I loved the action, but I disliked the script. It was disjointed and far too stylized, while I'm as much a fan of hand-held cameras as anybody, it was overused in the whole picture, and then combined with what amounted to a strobe effect as the screen flashed split seconds of disparate scenes. While these things can be very effective and provide unique perspectives they are not necessary in being used so often.
I liked ideas, in the film, such as Kable drinking a whole bottle of vodka or alcohol, so he can later be sick into a car, hence giving fuel to the vehicle. A particularly disgusting fat guy controlling a girl confused me, but also made sense, in the regard there are a vast amount of sickos out there. A midget, a basketball final act, and a massive shootout in a suburban area show how surreal this whole affair is.

Overall, Gamer is over so fast, gives us new ideas as well as old ones, opens our eyes to a futuristic vision of possibility. Gamer seems to be released in a time where hollywood seems to be interested in ''control'' and ''future'' with the also similar Surrogates. Fans of Gerard Butler, action films or futuristic movies will love this, just don't go into Gamer expecting a revelation or mind-blowing twist, this is violent rollercoaster fun.

''This is not something you can control!''


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