Regurgitated adolescence

The posters for the execrable Gamer feature Gerard Butler's leaden visage with a crack down the middle and a gawky teenage Logan Lerman peeking out from within. It's a strikingly accurate symbolic expression of the film's essential character: adult action with the soul of an adolescent.

However unintentional such inferences may be - clearly the intent was to represent the film's premise, which has society's undesirables plugged into a live-action, remote-control video game - the idea of a hunky violent badass acting as a stand-in for a scrawny, inadequate kid is pure teenage fantasy, and nothing else.

It should come as no surprise to learn such pap is the brainchild of the writer/director team Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the enfants terribles who brought us the orgy of gratuitous violence that is the Crank franchise. Gamer is better than Crank, in the same way that dog food for dinner is better than dirt, but the films are of a piece.

Set in the future, Butler's Kable is one of an army of pawns of wealthy gamers who manipulate them remotely in a war game, Slayers, where the blood and guts are real. The gladiators, death row inmates, for the most part, have consented to participating in deadly battles in the hope of winning a reprieve, which they've been promised if they can survive 30 consecutive games. But it's a crapshoot with the odds fixed in favor of the house. By the time we pick up with Kable, not a single "contestant" has lived through the requisite number of conflicts to win his freedom.

The contests, broadcast live to an adoring public, are festivals of gore, with whole busloads of prisoners and other contestants shot, stabbed, blown up, crushed, beaten and otherwise dispatched in pursuit of quality programming. Here one cannot avoid allusions to reality television and wonders when modern broadcasting will resort to outright violence in order to satiate the average viewer's penchant for schadenfreude. At any rate, because of his ability to resist his controller and react more quickly than the other contestants, Kable has achieved celebrity by surviving battle after battle, and is seemingly on the cusp of obtaining his liberty.

Michael C. Hall (Six Feet Under, Dexter) is amusing as Ken Castle, the sociopathic inventor/owner of the game (Why is he so good as winsome killers?), whose plots to exploit the world are seemingly impervious to any attempt to foil them. Castle cannot allow Kable to win his freedom, so he orders a plant inserted in the next game, a free-agent mercenary without the limitations of a controller. Hackman (Terry Crews) is a psychopathic killer with a gift for gutting his victims by hand, and, when he locates Kable, our hero has his work cut out for him. Meanwhile, a resistance movement dubbed Humanz has risen up to liberate Kable from the unwinnable gladiatorial games, in the hope he can help free the human race from the tyranny of technocrats and the greed of a voyeuristic consumer class.

Kable's wife, Angie (Amber Valletta), has been similarly reduced to playing in a remote-controlled virtual game called Society, which allows players to manipulate real people in a social setting, turning them into body doubles for degenerates. Kable is determined to free her and reunite with their daughter, but his attempts are forestalled by Castle's bloodthirsty ambitions as the film rockets toward its gruesome climax.

Neveldine and Taylor have cloaked their attempt to exploit the limited success of the even more violent and misogynist Crank in a premise that seems to satirize and point out the moral bankruptcy of a culture obsessed with sex and violent entertainments. But only the teenagers and teenagers-at-heart who go for such things will miss the irony of Gamer. Neveldine and Taylor are real-life versions of Castle, taking the tendency in popular entertainments to tap into the voyeurism and prurience of the public to its logical extreme. That audiences have embraced such nihilist artifacts - even to the limited extent offered by Neveldine and Taylor's films - is troubling commentary indeed.

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com