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Game Of Death shows how much things have changed, since in the early ’90s, Wesley Snipes was a popular actor.
Powerful performances in Jungle Fever, New Jack City plus an attempt to be young pretender to the crowns of Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone with kick-ass action roles like Passenger 57, Drop Zone and co-starring with the latter in Demolition Man. Then his star waned and his Hollywood bankability diminished somewhat with some mediocre choices, apart from the Blade Trilogy which showed he could still pull one out of the bag when it counted. However, a movie like U.S. Marshals felt more like a farce than an action flick and offerings like One Night Stand were just terminal pieces of dullness. His conviction and 3-year-term of imprisonment for tax fraud, currently being served, have not helped his case either.
And so to Game of Death where he plays Marcus, a man with a past who strolls into Father Clarence’s (Ernie Hudson) church and says he wants to donate a bag containing $1m, leading the sceptical priest to ask him if he wants to confess. As they talk, the majority of the film is told in flashback.
Once an undercover agent for the CIA, his mission depicted is to infiltrate the Redvale Corporation who have many millions invested in oil exploration in Africa but are getting resistance from the government so need arms dealer Frank Smith (Robert Davi), to tool up the rebels to ensure the deal goes through. Marcus’ task is to go over there, get himself a reputation as a hard-ass mercenary, get employment as a bodyguard for Smith, then eventually take both Smith and the Redvale Corportation out.
Promising start, then, with Licence to Kill Bond villain Davi (below) back as a baddie and action also provided by Marcus’ team members, Zander (martial arts expert Gary Daniels, bottom pic) and Floria (stuntwoman Zoe Bell). Alas, that’s when it all falls apart. Neither Daniels nor Bell can act to save their lives and Davi looks so old that these days he looks like he’s made of leather, even more so than Michael Portillo! I’m surprised he’s only turning 60 this year. Also, Davi gets very little to do as he spends most of his time in a hospital bed or a wheelchair recouperating from a heart attack, making almost zero use of his talents.
Add to this lots of pointless shootouts of Marcus shooting at someone who’s ducked behind a wall, then he hides while the baddie takes a shot… rinse and repeat. Things get even worse when a bad guy chases him in a hospital ward that’s oh so conveniently part of a new wing so no-one can see him waving a gun about(!) Throw in some double crossing, making you wonder who’s on which side? …For about five seconds, and anyway, after a while you stop caring; and also one of my pet hates which is bad guys utilising good guys for one or two scenes and then offing them for the hell of it, even though there was no necessity for it, making them look like extraneous cannon fodder.
Game of Death is a movie that’s predictable to the last, and fails early on by not even showing Marcus trying to ingratiate himself with Smith as he’s immediately shown alongside the man on his private plane. In fact, it’s such an appalling film that THIS is should’ve been the reason he went to jail!
Presented in 2.35:1 and in 1080p high definition, there are no flaws with the print but the direction is appalling. Mid-action sequence, the image doubles or triples over itself, as if you’ve just had half a bottle of vodka. God knows how that’s meant to heighten the effect of what you’re watching as it just has a very jarring effect. To make matters worse, sometimes he throws in other random effects that spoil it as if he’s a kid with a new toy who can’t wait to press every button.
The sound is in 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, for which I got the 5.1 DTS version, and delivers the usual sorts of things you’d expect from a film like this – gunfire, dialogue and occasional bits of the score – with no problems, but there’s little to shout about when most of the gunfire comes from guns with silencers. You are not going to have a surround-tastic time here.
I can’t get excited about the extras, either, as there’s very little in them: merely a trailer (2:01) in 2.35:1. I’d say it gives everything away, but it’s a load of nonsense anyway, so there’s nothing to lose. This is accompanied by a behind the scenes featurette, Game of Death: A Story of Betrayal (11:44), an extra-by-numbers of ‘let’s mix some clips amongst tiny soundbites and B-roll footage’.
The menu mixes clips from the film with a very small piece of looped theme music and the number of chapters is the usual embarrassment from Optimum with a paltry 12 over the 98-minute running time. In addition there’s a series of trailers that come before the main menu. Why do studios do this? Have they forgotten what the extras menu is for? You have to fast-forward through them too, as they’re not chaptered. Total farce. As such, I’m not listing them here. Oh, and to add insult to injury – there aren’t even any subtitles? Optimum, you didn’t just drop the ball here, you dropped the whole bag-full.
Game Of Death is out now on Blu-ray and DVD.
|
FILM CONTENT PICTURE QUALITY SOUND QUALITY EXTRAS |
2 6 6 1 |
| OVERALL | 4 |
Detailed specs:
Cert: 
Running time: 98 minutes
Year: 2010
Distributor: Optimum
Cat no: OPTBD1739
Released: February 21st 2011
Chapters: 12
Picture: 1080p High Definition
Sound: 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, DTS 5.1, Dolby Digital 5.1
Languages: English
Subtitles: None
Widescreen: 2.35:1
Disc Format: BD50
Director: Giorgio Serafini
Producers: Billy Dietrich, Philippe Martinez and Rafael Primorac
Screenplay: Jim Agnew and Megan Brown
Music: Jesse Voccia
Cast:
Agent Marcus: Wesley Snipes
Floria: Zoe Bell
Smith: Robert Davi
Zander: Gary Daniels
Redvale: Quinn Duffy
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.