Gamer

“Not screened for critics, Gamer is the latest offering from the writing-directing team of Neveldine/Taylor, whose work on Crank and Crank 2 made them stand out as toxic bad-boys of modern movie making. Featuring Jason Statham as a revved-up seemingly indestructible antihero, the Crank films were referred to as the ultimate synthesis of movies and videogames — and raised the question of if that was a synthesis that was, in fact, good for the movies. But if Crank and Crank 2 represented the idea of “movie as videogame,” then Gamer represents the idea of everything as videogame — set in a near-future where nanotechnological implants offer players the chance to control another human being’s motions and words. Gerard Butler is Kable, who we first meet running, dodging and shooting in an abandoned factory. Kable’s motions are being controlled by his operator, Simon (Logan Lerman), a punk kid who’s far from the danger and the action. Kable’s a death-row inmate, fighting and killing and possibly dying with the promise that if he survives 30 sessions of the game — called “Slayers” — he’ll go free.

And even in that pitch, you can spot at least three other movies swirling about — The Most Dangerous Game, The Running Man, the recent remake of Death Race — but even with all of these borrowed moments and ideas, Gamer still feels thin, hollow, undermade. There’s a series of fairly familiar characters in Gamer — Butler just wants to get home to his family, Lerman’s callow kid needs to learn about the moral consequences of his actions, Kyra Sedgwick’s amoral reporter will quit watching and start caring, and Michael C. Hall’s corrupt computer genius, the man behind “Slayers,” will hiss and twirl his mustache (metaphorically)  and delight in his control of every puppet and every string. …”

– From My Redbox Review