Review of Gamer (2009) by Gordon N — 07 Nov 2010

There are moments where film making savvy and general competence sneak into the film, seemingly despite all efforts to prevent it from happening. this is not a good movie, but it wasn't doomed from the word go, which is shocking for a film about mindless violence and videogames.

Terry Crews has an awesome scene in a locker room that is intense and genuinely disturbing, but then he just becomes a joke dispatched repeatedly like he was a Looney Tune -- No sense of dread, no peril, no real conflict. Michael C. Hall also manages an effective creepiness using a different, less vein-bulging tactic, even while his character is given nothing but nonsense for dialog. All the dialog sounds like something written as the first attempt at human communication. It's real tongue twisters of inhuman speech. That's it for the praise for the acting. Gerard Butler is a warm body. I'm not entirely sure his role really required the warm part. Alison Lohman gives a performance that can only be described as Steven-Hawking's-voice-box-esque. By that I mean her lack of emotion or normal speech pattern had to require technology of some kind to create.

The film uses disorienting camera sweeps and angles and quick cuts to create a feeling of nausea and discomfort, especially effective with a grotesquely overweight, perverted gamer and in the game world of "Society." Then I guess since it worked so well there, the same disorienting style persists when mundane and straight forward things are happening. It's already hard enough following the film when the dialog is practically an alien language and the pacing of the plot is schizophrenic. Then the camera starts cutting to extreme close ups and whipping around and completely removing any sense of place or time. At times the film would have been more clear if it was just random colors flashing while two cats fought inside a piano for the soundtrack.

Oh yeah, also no one is likable, their motivations are left mysterious during the time we are supposed to be getting to know their characters and possibly empathizing, so who cares what happens anyway?