Game Off

As an avid video game player for over 20 years, I’ve seen the evolution of gaming firsthand. From the old Atari console to the Nintendo Family Computer all the way to the sleek Playstation 3, I’ve seen them all and I’ve played them all. With games like The Sims and Second Life being prevalent in recent years, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that a lot of people have been escaping their rather mundane existence by participating in video games instead. But if instead of playing as simple pixilated, computer-generated characters, we controlled real humans instead, could that be the next step in video game evolution?

That’s the main premise behind Gerard Butler’s action-adventure Gamer. In the near future, game developer Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall) has created two hugely popular games: “Society” is like The Sims except that gamers control actual people through nanites in their brains. In the case of “Slayers”, gamers play a first-person shooter (ala-Doom) by controlling ex-convicts with the same nanite-infected brains. If a slayer wins 30 battles, he goes free. A former military man named Tillman (Butler) is accused of murder and forced to participate in “Slayers” as the character Kable. Controlled by 17-year old trustfund baby Simon (Logan Lerman), Kable is three wins away from freedom. However, an activist group called Humanz claims that the nanite technology has a more ominous purpose. Can Tillman escape the game and reclaim his life?

Clearly, Gamer has been influenced by films like Death Race, The Matrix, The Running Man, and even Tron. The vision of a dystopian future where people are used for violent entertainment has been shown on film many times before. This film’s draw for me (aside from the über-cool Butler in another action flick) is the concept of humans as videogame characters. I particularly enjoyed the “Society” segments where the people actually acted like “Sims”. There was a lot of gratuitous violence here, and the script isn’t all that inspired. Directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor are the same people behind Jason Statham’s action flick Crank, so Gamer is in the same vein. Lots of jump cuts, and dirty action kind of left me feeling dizzy after a while. Maybe it was because the filmmakers wanted to emphasize how first-person shooting games are supposed to make you feel.

I was surprised with the many cameos in this film, particularly with actors like Milo Ventimiglia, Sam Witwer, and especially the great John Leguizamo. I mean, this isn’t exactly going to be remembered as a classic of the genre, if you know what I mean. Kyra Sedgwick, Keith David, and John de Lancie were also severely underused in this film, a real shame considering how the movie desperately needed good acting and actors to lift it from its not so lofty perch.