Review // GAMER - Fear for the future

This is a rant, sorry.

Gamer, like Crank and Crank 2 from the same "filmmakers" Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor, looks to get a reaction from the viewer, and unfortunately I fell for this trap HARD. I had a strong reaction to Gamer, perhaps the strongest emotions I've had for a film since... fuck, probably Crank 2 actually.

Gamer is a racist, deeply misogynistic torture session that adopts the worst filmmaking techniques of the digital age and mercilessly abuses them in an effort to simultaneously bore and repulse with its artless, pornographic evocation of a violent dystopia. And I'm not talking about the violent dystopia amateurishly depicted in the movie, I'm talking about the dystopia we are living where people like Neveldine/Taylor are given 50 million dollars to attempt to dismantle the very idea of entertainment. This is the worst, most depressing "movie" I've seen since...fuck, probably Crank 2 actually.

Gamer's story and setting is unabashedly lifted entirely from The Running Man. Not altered or inspired-by, just stolen shamelessly and then botched. The man-hunting-man movie did not begin with The Running Man by any means, and goes back as far as 1932's The Most Dangerous Game, but The Running Man is just the one most X'ers remember. Neveldine/Taylor don't bother to add anything new, except for a lazy, half-assed videogame angle that is underdeveloped and nonsensical.

Gerard Butler, who seems to be on a singular quest to burn his career to the ground, is a soldier, or a death-row inmate, I didn't really get which. He is controlled via nano-techno-gobbly-gook by a snotty telegenic teenager in a real-world death-match game called Slayer. This teen, who lazes around in a goofy technological womb of wraparound screen/walls, spends his days looking at tits and killing human beings with his Butler-avatar. Also Butler, who's name is both Kane and Tillman for some reason, has a family that he loves. There's your motivation folks. Also, like The Running Man, there is a resistance who think that humans killing humans for sport is not very nice. Duh.

Gamer's lame videogame condemnation plot already feels tacky, hysterical and dated, but it also makes little sense. Kane/Tillman is an international superstar, revered as an athlete for his killings in the game Slayer. But he's being completely controlled by the teenager, so I don't understand why Kane is this mega-celebrity. That would be like awarding Master Chief the trophy at a Halo tournament even though it was some kid who actually shot his way through the competition. The plot and world do not bear scrutiny.

This whole world-gone-mad-with-nano-violence has been engineered by billionaire asshole Castle, played unfortunately by the talented Micheal C. Hall. Besides the game of Slayer, he has also created Society, a Second Life-style social game where humans control other humans for sex and debauchery. Gerard Bulter's wife is a Society avatar played by poor model/actress Amber Valletta, and she is the grist in Neveldine/Taylor's degradation grind. Valletta spends the entire movie wearing a futuristic prostitute wardrobe and getting manipulated into creepy sexual trysts by her controller, a morbidly obese shut-in who slathers his belly in syrup while masturbating and shoveling down fistfuls of waffles. There is an extended, agonizingly protracted shot of Valletta's crotch in Silver panties as it is being roughly fondled by a character by the name of Rick Rape. She shouldn't just fire her agent, she should sue him.

Also in for the abuse is actress Kyra Sedgwick as a completely underwritten, unneeded stock opportunistic reporter. I watch a lot of movies and I never see Sedgwick in anything. Let's face it, she's married to Kevin Bacon and he doesn't have his own six-degrees-of-separation game for nothing. Bacon's been in a lot of movies and has done okay. But he's also one of the Hollywood actors who got fleeced out of millions by scam artist Bernie Madoff. Is Sedgwick looking to improve the Bacon family's cashflow with the dirty money earned from Gamer? I can't see another good reason for participating in this mess.

Gamer's awfulness is apparent from the first five minutes, but things get exponentially shittier when each of the three L's appear. The three L's are hopeless actors John Leguizamo, Ludacris and Allison Lohman. A movie can be immediately dismissed if either Leguizamo or Ludacris are in the cast. John Leguizamo has been making shitty movies since time immemorial, with Spawn and The Pest immediately coming to mind. But Ludacris is in the Oscar-winning Crash, you say? I rest my case. Lohman is a cute pixie-ish actress that apart from Drag Me To Hell, has a really spotty resume and doesn't fare well at all with her role here as a delivery system for some awful techno-babble exposition that the writers (also N/T) have lazily added for the few morons who will actually try to connect the dots.

Check out some examples of their writing:
-When one of the Humanz finally meets Butler, who has taken on a celebrity status, he says "Kane... you're great."
-The camera glides over the cityscape and we see a stenciled graffitti tag that reads: Slayer is bad TV.
-NT's only attempt at world-building is to add misogyny to the common lexicon by having people say things like "We're cunt hair close" and "the chances are cock-hard solid" and when Sedgwick's character gets a little excited about the possibility of an exclusive interview with Ken Castle her boss says "Stop menstruating, just tell me we fucking have it"  

I originally watched Crank because critics called it the "best action movie since Die Hard". It's not. Crank has the action coreoghraphy of a post-Reservoir Dogs student film. Crank 2 doesn't fair much better, with the sight of a floating horse cock its only lasting image, not any bursts of kinetic action flare. The action scenes in Gamer seem as if they were directed by someone who saw Saving Private Ryan and said "god, my brain can like, totally comprehend how all these old-timey fags are dying, it's soooo boring! Speed things uuuup!" Along with ADD editing and copious shaky-cam, N/T literally add strobe lights to some scenes just in case your eyes were somehow still able to make out anything on the screen.

The fact that the visuals are torture and the anemic story is a piece of shit that offers no motivation for enduring Neveldine/Taylor's abuse is hardly surprising when considering Gamer's overall contempt for the viewer. But it is indicative of their intent.  It may seem like N/T are trying to invade Hollywood and change the game with truly off-the-wall creations, but they are really just trying to see that the bar for genre movies plummets to the shallow depths of their imagination. I could almost respect N/T if they were truly avant-garde (as some have labeled them) and dispensed with the lame story beats and tacked on character motivation, filling the time with blood geysers and whatever else they get pumped about. But they end up just playing by all the same rules that they purport to break.  And that is perhaps what is most insidious about their brand of genre entertainment. It's the same old thing, only far more obnoxious. They basically make Joel Silver pictures minus anything resembling wit. Fair Game is more avant-garde in its awful-ness than Gamer. 

Certain movies are critic-proof, made as a deliberate "fuck-you" to good taste. The movies of John Waters and the Jackass films come to mind. They act as an exploration into the nature of entertainment and reveal truths about our caveman selves that have not been erased in the modern age. People getting hurt is funny. People making poops is funny. But the Jackass and Water's movies, while profane and debauched, have a sweetness to them, an innocence even, that makes them charming even while they are covering the lens in vomit. The "movies" of Neveldine/Taylor also strive for a critic-proof excess, but are so relentlessly mean and ugly that they end up saying more about the makers and less about the watchers. This is especially true since both Crank 2 and Gamer have underperformed badly at the box office, proving that while the world can be an ugly place, audiences are not fully prepared to turn it into the irredeemable shithole that Neveldine/Taylor wish it to be.

I love exploitation movies and I love trash, but I just can't abide Neveldine/Taylor's brand of of it, which reeks of Red Bull and Jaggermeister. They make trash for dudes who pop their collars and douse themselves in Axe Body Spray. It's just not cool trash. One could derive a certain amount of enjoyment out of their stylistic excesses, if the implications weren't so unsettling. A shot where spattered blood, glowing under the blacklights of a rave, is used as lubrication for a faux-sapphic display of skank could be hilarious if it didn't ride through your brain like a horsemen of the apocalypse.

Some will call this satire, that N/T are critiquing the Internets digital reshaping of our culture, but I don't buy it. I purposely watched the director interviews on this and the Crank 2 discs because I wanted to see what these guys had to say for themselves. They do not come off as satirists, I'm sorry. They are capital "D" dudes who aren't commenting on or critiquing the cruelty and machismo of the 80's action movies they grew up with. They are simply trying to frantically one-up them.



Do they sound like knowing satirists?

With this latest movie, Neveldine and Taylor have truly put bro's before ho's and created a masterpiece for assholes. The retarded Sci and illiterate Fi of Gamer doesn't posit a world where technology-fuelled machismo has been taken to its logical conclusion, but a world where Neveldine/Taylor movies have been taken to their logical conclusion. Read like that, Gamer is a truly chilling cautionary tale.