Gamer
Friday, September 4th 2009, 3:39 PM
This year’s hot sci-fi concept - putting one person’s consciousness in another body - is really getting a workout. Earlier this year there was the Mexican film “Sleep Dealer,” and coming up is the Bruce Willis actioner “Surrogates,” and of course the Big Kahuna, James Cameron’s “Avatar.” For right now, though, there’s “Gamer,” which pushes its way to the front of the line like a gorilla with a chainsaw.
In a near-future world, Kable (Gerard Butler) is a Death Row inmate forced to participate in a simulated-world game conceived of by a mad Internet billionaire (Michael C. Hall): Prisoners can have “nano-cells” implanted in their brains which allow players in the outside world to control their movements through a war-torn battlescape game called “Slayers.”
Kable is controlled by Simon, a 17-year-old (Logan Lerman, showing nothing of the presence he showed in the recent “My One and Only”) who becomes a Web star for guiding Kable to survival. But Kable, his real-live avatar, wants independence, so Simon unplugs and Kable enters the real world, where his onetime wife is a robot-slave, his daughter is lost and a rogue group is trying to disconnect the billionaire’s influence.
There are elements of “The Matrix” here, as well as “Rollerball,” Strange Days,” and, in the movie’s best sequence, “A Clockwork Orange,” as Hall sings a creepy version of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” as Kable fights off a team of soldier drones. But rip-offs of other movies don’t make this one better; it just makes it seem like a Xerox of a Xerox, with vague technobabble standing in for story (and really, does anyone think it’s interesting anymore to see super-advanced computer technology at the movies?).
Hall (TV’s “Dexter”) vamps around like a would-be Bond villain and adds a bit of spark, and the lovely Alison Lohman has a small role as cyberpunk good-girl terrorist. Otherwise, a lot of people with too much time on their hands — Kyra Sedgwick, Amber Valletta, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Milo Ventimiglia, John Leguizamo — show up like they’re auditioning for a robot exhibit at DisneyWorld. Butler, for his part, appropriately hulks around like a videogame character, nothing more.
There’s plenty of violence, but the movie’s already-passe fear of a Web-based world is standard-issue. Directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, who did the manic “Crank,” bring their ADD style to this, but what the movie needs more than anything else is a fast-forward button.
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