Download Gamer Full Movie
April 7, 2010 by Improv Mastermind
Filed under mastermind download
Gamer suffers from a fundamental paradox (beyond the usual one of rational people agreeing to be a part of such blithering idiocy) that has destroyed many a dystopic science fiction film before it. It posits a future where real human beings have replaced VR constructs in video games: feeding our collective inhumanity by allowing us to control another person like a puppet. Then, having established that society as a whole is the source of the problem, it provides a single evil mastermind at the heart of it all, implying that if we just eliminate the one bad apple, everything will be fine. That crushes the social commentary beneath simplistic clichés, old as dirt decades ago and showing little improvement with age. Gamer indulges in them to its supreme detriment, along with a number of other dippy concepts it can’t hope to support.
The evil mastermind in this case is a computer mogul named Castle (Michael C. Hall), who has perfected nanites that utterly control another person’s movement. He spins this off into a series of hugely successful games: “Society,” which plays like the most erotic corners of Second Life and “Slayer” which plays like Rainbow Six and similar shoot-’em-ups. The former is populated by desperate souls willing to be manipulated like living dolls in order to fulfill the sex fantasies of drooling shut-ins. The latter, on the other hand, uses real guns and real bullets, fired by condemned criminals who enter the game with the promise of freedom should they survive. Our Hero stands at the top of that heap: an ex-soldier assigned the name of Kable (Gerard Butler) who has survived far beyond that of any other contestant thanks to a combination of his own skills and the twitchy-fingered teenager (Logan Lerman) controlling him.
This brings up another of Gamer’s innumerable problems. What, exactly, is the benefit of using real human beings like virtual ciphers? Is there an added thrill to it? Something visceral that makes it irresistible? Humans are harder to control, they tire more easily, their deaths are more horrific and though you can dress them up any way you want, you can’t alter their skin or shape the way you could a virtual avatar. Yet Gamer maintains that this is somehow preferable to computer-generated figures because it’s more “real.” The concept might hold up better with a little more thought put into it, but there’s none to be had here, which turns it all into a giant head-scratcher.
And that doesn’t begin to touch on the countless more mundane problems plaguing The Gamer like a horde of locusts. For starters, it’s just plain goofy: stringing together hackneyed notions of dark futures, corporate overloads and a valiant “resistance” trying to shake the populace out of their media-induced stupor. Kable becomes the catalyst for their revolt, given the tools to break out of his trap and hunt down Castle in a climactic battle to the finish. But directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor invest so little thought into his dilemma that nothing onscreen even begins to register a pulse.
Instead, they try to tart it up with a lot of spastic visuals–loads of fun during the directors’ Crank films, but just noisy and empty here. Kable is allowed a few moments of inspiration, but they remain isolated amid scene after scene of seizure-inducing gobbledygook. Gamer also plays into ugly stereotypes about its titular demographic, rendered here as obese letches or morally bankrupt high schoolers. Kable and his family serve as hollow nice guys in a world full of leering monsters, a concept requiring much more effort than anyone here is willing to give.
It becomes all the more astonishing when you look at the names among the cast–Keith David, Alison Lohman, Kyra Sedgwick, Zoë Bell and Milo Ventimiglia among others. All of them are capable of better things, and yet with the exception of David, all of them look like they’re just marking time until they can cash their checks. John Leguizamo makes a particularly odd appearance, given absolutely nothing to do and leaving the sneaking suspicion that a lot of his performance was left on the cutting room floor. It couldn’t be any worse than the footage they left in, though thankfully it keeps Gamer short enough to endure quietly before fleeing the theaters for a long hot shower.
