Gamer

It seems perverse that two films released on the same day can offer such a disparate experience, The Red Balloon being a film of aching passion and subtlety and Gamer being the cinematic equivalent of a toilet brush.

This sense of injustice is perhaps doubled since Gamer will probably have made for money for its hackneyed creators Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor than the former film will make for the estate of Albert Lamorisse, but such are the breaks.

Such dismal proceedings take place "Some years from this exact moment", as a portentous introduction introduces us to a future-world where humans control other humans in huge multi-player online gaming environments. The downside is that the in-game participants are Death Row inmates likely to be evaporated in their attempt to gain freedom from their virtual world. Featuring homme du jour Gerard Butler, who currently seems like he would appear at the opening of a local Lidl store if the film role required it, Gamer clunks from one turgid, joyless set-piece to the next with flagrant disregard for the poor viewer who is assaulted by endless seizure-inducing scenes. Butler's character Kable is the best "Slayer" there is, controlled by teen nerd Simon who is courted worldwide for control of his mindless Avatar as the evil genius behind the game (Dexter's Michael C Hall) revels in the money-making opportunism his creation has garnered.

Hall comes out with a modicum of dignity before a bizarre song and dance number (that needs to be seen to be believed) threatens to derail the whole sorry exercise into risible farce. Neveldine and Taylor are responsible for vomiting the Crank series onto the screens and, whilst those films at least had a sense of humour and a nihilistic rush of stupidity, Gamer instead reveals itself to be nothing more than a cut scene that you desperately want to fast forward until the Game Over screen appears.



Released on DVD and Blu-ray on 18th January 2010 by Entertainment In Video.

Written by Simon Cole.