Lamer

In a dystopian future, real humans are used as video-game avatars by the people who can afford to pay to play them. One could claim that this is a clever allegory for the widening class divide, but that would require a cohesive representation of an idea, which Gamer does not have. Sinister game designer Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall) has created Slayer, a game in which player-controlled death-row inmates murder each other. Kable (Gerard Butler: manliest Scotsman in Hollywood) and his controller, Simon (who cares?), are the stars of slayer, having only four more games to play before Kable is released to go see his wife and daughter, whom he has little dream sequences about. Even with his unkempt appearance and murdering of others for personal gain, deep down Kable’s a wrongly-imprisoned softy, and so we’re supposed to love him. Gamer is basically The Green Mile, only Kable is white and someone in the federal penitentiary system decided that the best way of exercising death-row inmates was to arm them with automatic weapons and send them outside for a bit of a frolic. In case you’re wondering, future prison is a white chalk quarry where prisoners wear white outfits and no-one understands the concept of camouflage. Prison guards wear black fatigues with breathing apparatuses that they don’t need because the prisoners breathe just fine without them, but wardrobe evidently got confused between looking cool and looking stupid.

Gamer actually starts out quite well: Kable introduces himself by shooting his way through a few dozen men and then gets blown out of a window. Unfortunately, someone decided the expression “start as you mean to go on” should be taken literally, and just copy/paste this same action sequence three more times into the first forty minutes of the film. This creates an issue with the pacing, and the four battle sequences all blur together into one. No time is left between shootouts to develop the character of Kable, and so seeing him on-screen feels like a trip to Madame Tussauds. The battle scenes themselves are glitchy and punctuated by static and time lags to create a sense of being in the game, but it’s annoying after the first few minutes. In one particular scene a guy’s leg blows clean off. I mean literally clean – there’s no messy blood or exploding bits, the foreleg just separates from the knee joint like it’s made out of bread pudding.

Gamer gets progressively worse as it goes on. The third act turn: Ken Castle has Kable’s daughter. Fuck off! Since when do child services let creepy, sociopathic game developers become legal guardians for children whose mothers are still alive? Unnecessary, clunking plot devices like this are peppered throughout the film, but this particular one stood out worse than Bootsy Collins at a KKK rally. So Kable goes to Castle’s bad guy lair to get his daughter back, and finds Castle and his remaining henchmen doing a dance number to I’ve Got You Under My Skin by Cole Porter. This is not a joke – they do a choreographed dance routine and Castle mimes along and pretends to be a puppet, just to ram that symbolism down your throat in case you missed it. Kable dispatches the henchmen, has a chat with Castle instead of just killing him, and they then relocate to a basketball court (that’s right) for the real showdown. Hackman (Terry Crews), the super-henchman is back, and even though bullets and a cement wall at 100km/h couldn’t kill him, Kable does so by breaking his neck – twice! I want to know which pillock writer decided that would be a cool thing to put into the script: for a character to have his neck broken once, by twisting it one way, and then broken again by twisting it the other way. I’m sure the writing team gave congratulatory high-fives and Dutch rudders all round for that one.

It’s unfortunate that Gamer was such a terrible film, because it had the potential not to be. It’s an original idea, mainly, but piss-poor execution let it down. If the film was half an hour longer, not only would it be standard-length, but they would have had time to fit in some real character development. Gamer was written and directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the dynamic duo who brought us such cinematic greats as Crank and Crank 2. Things came into much clearer focus after I realised this, like my favourite bad scene, in which a woman seated at a table, wearing an oversized, white afro wig, catches a bullet in the head. Instead of slumping over, dead, as a head-bullet is prone to make one do, she goes flying up, out of her seat, across the table, and lands in a heap on the other side. It must’ve been one of those magic bullets, like the one that got JFK.