Gamer (2009)

Film review #687

Director: Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor

SYNOPSIS: In the near-future, prisoners take part in a deathmatch where they are controlled by gamers. Once such prisoner is close to reaching the thirty win-streak needed to secure a full pardon and release, but the billionaire creator of the technology used to control people has designs to expand it’s use, and a resistance group that aims to stop him attempt to co-opt Kable to help them…

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Gamer is a 2009 sci-fi film. Set in the near0-future, where billionaire Ken Castle has invented a nanotechnology that allows people to become controllable by others, making them avatars in a real-life video game. Of course, this technology is eventually (inevitably) used for prisoners, where gamers can control death-row inmates in a deathmatch scenario, making them fight for their freedom. One such prisoner, Kable, only a few wins away from the thirty he needs to be released. However, he is dragged into a conflict with Castle and the hacker group who are trying to stop him from expanding his nanotechnology to have full control over every human that has the nanotechnology installed in their brain. The film’s premise is very simple: it’s a remix of films like The Running Man with all the cheesy characters and silliness you would expect. The film opens up trying to explain the mechanics of the whole nanotechnology and how gamers use it to control other people as avatars, but it quickly gets overwhelming fast, and it feels unnecessary for the most part: Gamer works as a mindless entertainment film full of explosions, shoot-outs and silly characters; the moment it tries to say something deeper, it is immediately lost amid the loud noises, visuals and quick-cuts that stop anything connecting substantially.

There’s a lot of characters and different angles in the film that makes it difficult for any one of them to stand or develop into anything more significant. Gerard Butler is…Gerard Butler as Kable; he’s the same as in every film he is in. he has a wife and child he is trying to reunite with after he is released, but also teams up with the hacker group to take down castle, and it is all a bit much. The action scenes have plenty of shooting and explosions, but as mentioned the constant camera-switching and not holding a shot for longer than two seconds means that everything is just so fleeting and nothing sticks, thus you’ll be hard-pressed to remember anything of substance once the credits roll. It’s got some recognisable faces including Ludacris and Terry Crews, but beyond that nothing special about the cast. It’s difficult to say if the film is meant to have a particular message, I think it tries to comment on corporate-sponsored violence and giving billionaires control of your bodies is probably a bad thing, but again anything of depth is lost as the film zips about haphazardly. It’s also difficult to have a message against corporate violence when violence is the only solution to anything in this film. Overall, I would say that Gamer delivers some decent action, but is way too poorly structured and haphazard in its attempt to do anything else. It doesn’t do anything that other films do much better.