Friday, December 30, 2011

Episode 99.5 - Gamer Review 2/10

Gamer - 2009 - Mark Nevaldine and Brian Taylor

Sometime in the not so distant future, the world has killed off its politicians, eliminated law enforcement, told religion to go fuck itself, and apparently has made every narcotic imaginable free and legal as long as every man, woman, and child takes at least one every day so they can enjoy a healthy dose of drool and epileptic seizure in the only kind of post-Facebook-alyptic world this bullshit premise that is Gamer can succeed in. I almost felt bad last night when I fell asleep during the middle of this movie until I finished it this morning and realized that it was probably my brain doing me a favor.

Truly good action movies find a balance between story and action. Decent action movies tend to sacrifice one for the other. Braindead what-the-fuck action movies crap on both of them and then obstruct your view of the heaping, fly-infested pile of shit with shiny lights, awkwardly framed boobs, and big, pointless explosions. The fact that Gamer treated itself like a blockbuster film and honestly thought it could get away with this dreadfully misguided, unfathomable, pedantic plotline is almost offensive to the entire action genre. It’s basically a cinematic version of “Duke Nukem Forever” from not just the point of view of the Duke himself, but the moron who played him as well.

Devoid of any logic or reason (or resistance for that matter), Gamer focuses around the story of John Tillman/Kable (Gerard Butler) who is part of a kill-or-be-killed style of game where 30 victories grants you your freedom from death row. Whereas the world idolizes the run that Kable has (at 27 victories at the start of the movie), the talent comes from his controller, Simon, who, through government-approved, socially-accepted, mind-controlling nano-technology, performs the killing actions necessary to achieve victory while every single-digit IQ’d spectator stares blankly at the television screen ignoring the fact that there is no society alive that would ever allow anything like this to enter the mainstream market.  

But apparently it’s helping the country get out of debt which is why it was allowed in this case, as each match generates nearly 650 million Pay-Per-View orders (as PPV is a government owned enterprise now, I guess) just in case people can’t head to their nearest city and watch the game for free on every wall of every building in it. As Kable approaches the 30 mark, he discovers he’s part of a grand conspiracy and Bond-villain-esque diabolical plot to control the entire world because some black guy said so and the movie just kind of agreed without asking any questions. In fact, this movie never asked any questions and I fear that if I were to go to the theatre to see this and start asking questions myself, I probably would have gotten killed.

Gamer didn’t just have plot holes; it had plot craters the size of dinosaur-exterminating meteors and transitioned from scene to brain-numbing scene with disturbing images of sweaty, half-naked fat guys, “glitchy” screen jumps, unattractively superficial nudity, and above all, Gerard Butler racing around slack-jawed mumbling “duuuuh, what’s going on exactly…?” Sadly, these were probably the most intelligent lines in the film as every other piece of dialogue took place during conversation that seemed hurried so the filmmakers could get to the next pointless titshot (using honest to God lines like “do you want to see our tits?”).

I honestly can’t think of a single thing I enjoyed about this movie. I was too busy scratching my head on why I should care about any of its horribly developed characters, overly tired and unimaginative action sequences, watered down villains, grossly defective plot devices, and headache-inducing aneurysm-bursting cinematography. Even if this started with “On a distant planet, far away, in a society that you simply have to accept fucked themselves up this way because you’ve never heard of it before so who are you to argue…” this still wouldn’t pass as even mildly tolerable or well-planned.

I never thought I would actually say this. This is the type of thing that I thought was reserved for comedies and abysmal independent films but yeah, Gamer is probably the worst action movie I’ve ever seen (yes, I’m including Battlefield: Earth in my assessment) and it’s getting a surprising-for-this-genre 2 dustbusters out of 10. Game-fucking Over, man.

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