Film review: Gamer

Published on Friday 11 September 2009 18:30

GAMER (18) Directors: Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor Running time: 95 minutes **

I HAVE a suspicion that the script for Gamer wasn't so much written as cobbled together from the leftover chips and circuits from The Running Man, Death Race and Rollerball. Innocent man framed and cast into fearsome prison: check. Dystopian future where menacing leisure corporations rule: check. Women who seem to share their wardrobe choices with hookers: check.

Our current lord and master of the B-movie, Gerry Butler, plays Kable, a man unjustly convicted of murder and sent to prison. This is a Jim Morrison prison, though: no-one here gets out alive, unless they sign up and survive 30 missions as players in an interactive gladiatorial video game called Slayers, where the felons fight each other while being controlled by rich nerds. Meanwhile, Kable's wife (Amber Valletta) is making ends meet by working in another game called Society where her socialising consists of wearing tiny hotpants and heading out to dodgy clubs. Her controller is a morbidly obese man; and the idea that the attractive willing blonde on the internet is in reality a sweaty bloke with a keyboard should surprise precisely nobody.

But the real puppetmasters of Gamer are Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the hyperactive shoot-'em-up auteurs who created the trashy popcorn franchise Crank; aggressive films that took aim at the lowest common denominator, then kneecapped it.

Neveldine and Taylor apply their bad-boy high spirits and technical flair to shooting and cutting everything in Gamer like an ad for a particularly greasy brand of fragrance for men.

It may be intended to come across as satire but the film's beatings and killings are delivered in an atmosphere of morally weightless flash, and the rampant misogyny isn't subversive or witty, just painfully adolescent.

One general release from Wednesday