Gamer Movie Review

“Gamer” suffers from a fundamental paradox (beyond the usual one of rational people agreeing to be a part of such blithering idiocy) that has destroyed many a dystopic science fiction film before it. It posits a future where real human beings have replaced VR constructs in video games: feeding our collective inhumanity by allowing us to control another person like a puppet. Then, having established that society as a whole is the source of the problem, it provides a single evil mastermind at the heart of it all, implying that if we just eliminate the one bad apple, everything will be fine. That crushes the social commentary beneath simplistic clichés, old as dirt decades ago and showing little improvement with age. Gamer indulges in them to its supreme detriment, along with a number of other dippy concepts it can't hope to support…read more [Mania.com] “Gamer” recalls those awful virtual reality movies of the 90's “Johnny Mnemonic” and “Virtuosity”. Directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (those filmmakers critics love to hate) the movie is stylish trash; an imcomphrensible mess that is almost quite pointless. I'm sure there's an allegory about today's interactive entertainment, but it's lost amidst the heavy battle scenes that are horribly shot. Forget the “shaky cam”, if you want action that makes no sense at all, watch “Gamer”…read more [Horror-Movies.ca] This is a movie that you really hope to like because you can tell that Neveldine & Taylor have a lot of interesting and innovative ideas, and their first foray into science fiction plays like a cross between a prison movie and a war movie before ultimately revealing itself as a revenge thriller. As much as “Gamer” tries to declare itself as a post-modern high concept movie, the premise never seems completely thought through. For example the reasoning for people taking part in the game–“they like to have someone else in control”–makes no sense whatsoever when you see what the avatars go through. On top of that, the premise is played out in such post-modern film idea, it is so derivative of so many other films from “Running Man” to “Rollerball” to “The Condemned,” and it has just as much credibility of ever happening as any of those movies. Knowing the general structure for previous war, prison or revenge thrillers it's fairly predictable to know where things are going…read more [ComingSoon] Gerard Butler and Amber Valletta, Gamer “Some years from this exact moment,” we're told at the beginning of the dismal “Gamer,” Americans will be lining up to become flesh-and-blood avatars inside violent and lurid video game worlds. The bad news: Participants are likely either to be killed or imprisoned in an environment that looks like a David LaChapelle photo shoot. The good news: These kinds of games would render garbage like “Gamer” obsolete. “Gamer” actually makes you feel nostalgic for the time when the filmmaking team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (the duo behind the “Crank” movies) didn't feel burdened by the need to conjure up a story line or reflexively comment on American culture. Thought is antithetical to these guys' absurdist, Red Bull action aesthetic, serving only to slow the marching drumbeat of bloody explosions…read more [Los Angeles Times] The movie's twist on the present is actually pretty clever, presenting a world in which everyone is obsessed with either The Sims or Halo, except you're actually playing with real people. Kable (Gerard Butler) is one of the death-row inmates forced to play a shooting game while being controlled by a teenager (Logan Lerman) who has achieved celebrity by getting Kable through more levels than any other inmate has before. Meanwhile Kable's wife (Amber Valletta) is essentially a pleasure model in the Sims game, manipulated by a fat guy at home and walking around in booty shorts and a series of wigs like a zombie…read more [Cinema Blend] The directors try to get provocative at points, speculating about the potential moral slipperiness of their out-there science. Far smoother gear-shifting comes elsewhere. An initial loopy look at “Socials,'' the candy-colored “Sims''-esque experience that preceded “Slayers,'' whizzes by tantalizingly quickly. A climactic confrontation between Kable and the slyly grinning tech billionaire behind the game (Michael C. Hall of “Dexter,'' in the one performance of note) is full of lackeys getting their bones crunched – juxtaposed with Hall's character leading them in a jazzy Sammy Davis Jr. dance number. It's only when Neveldine and Taylor seem to be weighing some odd-fitting element and impulsively deciding, Annnh, why not, that the movie powers up fully…read more [Boston.com] Gamer, the third film written and directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor—who are credited, Madonna-like, as simply “Neveldine/Taylor”—has two tough acts to follow: the alternately loathed and loved Crank movies. With their Jason Statham-fueled action parodies (or were they?), the duo juiced conventional tropes so aggressively that they bypassed over-the-top en route to the delightfully absurd. The trouble with Gamer is that it's weird, but not weird enough for the long haul. Its familiar premise—death-row inmate must participate in dangerous games to earn his freedom, to the delight of the bloodthirsty public, who watch on pay-per-view—gets twisted nicely by technology: Every move that inmate/hero Gerard Butler makes through the urban war zones of “the game,” called Slayers, is controlled by a spoiled 17-year-old sitting in a visually overwhelming Internet playroom. If Butler and his gamer can win just a few more battles, he'll go home to his wife and daughter…read more [AVClub] I can't help but remember Death Race, Running Man and all others in the past that have dealt with completely changing the prison system into a game by using the inmates as pawns. The difference is, GAMER gets easily bored and distracted, like a kid who can't pay attention in class but when you give him a porn mag, his eyes grow big. For example, John Leguizamo's character is supposed to be the unlikely friend, there's always that unlikely friend who gets unlucky which then fuels the hero with more rage and desire to commit revenge. Unfortunately, Leguizamo does nothing but whisper gibberish most of the time and when he finally gets unlucky, you don't understand why Kable gets angry and felt compassion because the movie, being that it doesn't take its time to build relationship between characters, makes it seem like they're even hardly friends at all anyway. Leguizamo becomes just another poor basterds we could care less about in that bloody game…read more [Rama's Screen] “Gamer” Movie Video Review: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHpkhTuxzDo[/youtube]