As Gamer begins,
there are no titles as such, just words like 'Kable Killer' and 'Slayers' posted up as electronic billboards on
buildings all around the city.
This is because a man known as Kable (Gerard Butler) is a Slayer, one of a number of men taking part in
a live-action
Call of Duty-style game, played by
death row inmates, choosing this as an alternative sentence. If they stay alive after 30 sessions they
get set free. Kable has completed 27 so far, yet until now, no-one else has ever managed more than 10.
In yet another movie where death becomes the national sport, so to speak, Slayers is the violent follow-up to a
game called Society, where - to cut a long story short about how something scientific-sounding is meant to
sound complex - something called the Nanex controls your behaviour. It's been planted in the heads of those
who take part. In the case of Society - a game like The Sims, but controlling real human beings - rich people
pay to control them, while the participants get paid to be controlled, and demoralised.
The creator of these games is Ken Castle (Dexter's Michael C. Hall), a recluse who rarely gives
media interviews, yet chooses to give one, after nearly a decade, to Gina Parker Smith (Kyra Sedgwick),
a typical airhead daytime TV presenter, something which is soon hacked into by the Humanz, led by the Humanz
Brother (Chris 'Ludacris' Bridges), a group who are opposed to everything that Castle stands for and want
to see it brought to a crashing halt by putting viruses into the system to stop the games from running.
Naturally, Castle will fight his corner as his games have made him richer than Bill Gates overnight.
As Kable, or John Tillman as we learn he's really called, edges ever closer to freedom, he discovers that he's
being controlled by a teenage lad called Simon (Logan Lerman). Contact between the players and the convicts
is forbidden, but in the interests of a necessary plot device to come, that's something which Simon will choose
to ignore and which Tillman will choose to accept. In the meantime, when it comes to his final challenge,
he'll have to go up against Hackman, the latest and baddest slayer in Castle's creation. The difference with this
one is that he has no-one controlling him, whereas Tillman and all the rest have a problem with the 'ping',
the delay between the gamer performing the action and the convict carrying it out.
Gamer is an audio-visual treat and there's lots of little nuances that'll only be understood by gamers watching this,
such as an in-game moment of a man simply walking into the grill of a closed shop and continuing to try to walk
forward - something that happens frequently in games when the AI hasn't been programmed properly and
tertiary characters get themselves stuck in a loop of 'going nowhere'.
The directors behind
Crank and
Crank 2: High Voltage
certainly know their games and all the quick-cut kind of action a gaming fan would expect.
However, as you'd expect from any film like this, eventually the participants want to get back to real life and
when it stepped outside of the 'game' it did lose it a little and just wasn't as entertaining.
The acting in this film certainly never had to trouble the Oscars ceremony. Gerard Butler turns in a performance
that does the job as a man who just wants to get his life back, but there's nothing to shout about from the
rest. The rest of the cast includes Amber Valletta, as his wife Angie, is an actress in Society who's trying to get custody of her
son from social services system - which isn't easy when your husband is a lifer - but doesn't seem a particularly
concerned parent; John Leguizamo turns up in a completely redundant role as Freek, another lifer who's
chosen to take part in these games; Logan Lerman, who plays the game in a futuristic room-filling sort-of Xbox
Live dashboard; the uber-cute Alison Lohman, here with dreadlocks as Trace, who helps Tillman out along the
way; and Michael C. Hall, so damn good in Dexter, but while he's watchable here, it does feel like he had
a spare few days to kill, if you'll pardon the pun, and turned up to play the manical/mental baddie for a change.
Overall, Gamer is a slice of braindead fun, so switch your brain off, put this on and enjoy.
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