Review of Gamer (2009) by James S — 03 Aug 2012

Some movies just have guilty pleasure stamped all over them. High class drama with fine acting, direction and award winning cinematography are all well and good but sometimes you just want to grab a beer, a bag of crisps and take your pants off. Gamer is a movie for just such an occasion.

Part mindless violence, part satirical look at the world of computer games, Gamer takes the simple premise of what it would be like to be able to control a real live person in a computer game style environment. Gerard Butler, displaying fine action man chops, is a Slayer, a voluntary convict in the gaming environment who must survive just a couple more missions in Michael C Hall's revolutionary product before he wins his freedom. If this sounds a bit like the remake of Death Race but with joysticks instead of cars then you'd be on the right track to knowing what to expect here.

Naturally it's not as simple as all that for Butler as the conspiracies emerge. The plot can be a little flakey and it never gets in the way of more shooting and blowing things up but it hangs about enough to still make some kind of sense.

The action it has to be said, is dizzyingly fast, extreme head spinning stuff that you do feel a bit bamboozled bit it on occasion.

Performance wise, Butler is far from a let down but Hall's villainous IT tycoon could have been made more of and seems to have little screen time.

Gamer isn't quite as cohesive or as much fun as some of the other newer action movies. It can't really decide if it should go for a hard satirical edge on user-interactive technology and media or just concentrate on people setting off big explosions and a few shots of boobs. It does overload on the fun factor though and for an undemanding 90 minutes of mayhem, Gamer is good choice.