Review of Gamer (2001) by Jen M — 11 May 2011

Think of a future where surfing the net and gaming has gone to new heights. Your sitting in a chair in the middle of your living room, all 4 walls is your computer screen and you move from window screen to window screen by just waving your hands.

Ever play a computer game where you said "that computer generated character is hot"? A character like Laura Croft of Tomb Raider. Imagine a future where the sims has gone to a new level. You don't control a computer generated character, you control a human being (actors as they are called) who as their job is a character in a sim world controlled (with a chip in their brain) by a Gamer. What you have is a online game called Society.

Society became the biggest online sensation developed by Castle (Michael C. Hall of Dexter and Six Feet Under fame), this game elevated Castle to the richest man in the world moving ahead of Bill Gates. Imagine being a 16 year old kid controlling a real person who happens to be a beautiful women. The man/women is unaware of his/her actions when she is at work on the society set thanks to the chip in her brain. What you end up with is a perverted game of hot people doing whatever a Gamer desires them to do.

Next up for Castle is a new game called Slayer. Slayer takes the tired and over used concept of taking a convict and placing him in a game of life and death and if he wins enough times he becomes a free man, something along the lines of Running Man with Arnold Schwartzeneger. In Slayer you play a Halo type game where a convict volunteers to have this chip in his brain and this convict becomes connected with a gamer. This is where Kable (Gerard Butler) enters the game. Simon (Logan Lermer) is his human gamer. The gamer and the convict have a connection where the convict can act of his own accord, but the human can take over and force the convict to do whatever the convict desires, but there is a 1 second delay when the human takes over.

Slayer as a game is the hottest game on the market, people watch this game all over the world to packed audiences on outdoor screens. Kable is a world sensation along the lines of a WWE wrestler like the Rock. Simon is famous as the kid behind Kable.

Just like every other convict goes free movie Kable needs just 1 more victory to be free, and Simon is a sensation who has women throwing themselves at him like he is a rock star. Kables wife is a actress in the game called Society, she is controlled by what may be the fattest teen on earth. Kable's only goal is too get back to his wife and child. Did I forget to mention Kable has a daughter? oh well in the grand scheme of the movie it is the driving force behind Kable but the movie never gives you that feeling.

In my opinion the movie has a great and believable future setting, assuming we develop the technology I could see our world heading in that direction. I feel the movie has a lot of potential if it was done differently. I also enjoyed the end plot of what the protagonist was trying to accomplish, but I just never felt like this movie moved smoothly. I would of liked for the director to take the premise and the plot of this movie and make major changes to the flow of the movie.

I gave this movie a mediocre rating because of the plot premise and the background of the movie, but for the flow of the movie I give it a poor rating. The middle of the movie lost it for me and my enjoyment suffered for that reason.