The "Most Dangerous Game" conceit is, disappointingly, hard to pull off. The Running Man came out nearly 25 years ago, and nobody has been able to top it since. Hard Target is very entertaining but doesn't quite fit the criteria, Surviving the Game is low-rent from top to bottom, and Battle Royale is disappointing once you get past the initial shock of the premise. I haven't seen Death Race because it looks like a half-hearted remake of the highly entertaining original, and I haven't seen The Condemned because I find it hard to get excited for a WWE Films production.
When I saw the trailer for Gamer, it looked like a can't-miss trashy pleasure. It offered a novel twist on the concept: a kill-or-be-killed first person shooter, only with real people being controlled instead of digital avatars. Directors Neveldine/Taylor (yes, that's how they're credited) were responsible for the notorious Crank films. And my God, the cast! King Leonidas, Dexter, Dexter's Texas accent, Ludacris, the Closer, President Camacho, Peter Petrelli, Q, John Leguizamo, Zoe Bell, Alison Lohman, and Keith David. You couldn't assemble a more random cast with a blind man and a Los Angeles phone book.
Yet Gamer still manages to disappoint.
The trickiest part is the protagonist. Current American cinema lacks a traditional blockbuster action star, making Gerard Butler the poor man's equivalent of someone who doesn't exist. Butler is a vacuum of charisma, and the script doesn't give him anything to do besides shoot people and glower. In fact, it's hard to remember him having anything more than a handful of dialogue. The supporting cast gives it their all (special credit goes to Milo Ventimiglia's bug-eyed turn as "Rick Rape") but the results are hit and miss. Nobody buys Ludacris as the leader of a cabal of underground hackers, and the film's other two African-American characters are prototypical Scary Black Men. The kid who "plays" as Butler's character isn't heroic enough to admire or annoyingly immature to hate. Michael C. Hall's villain is painted in colossal strokes, but is so over the top he's practically sitting on the screen. In fact, the overall aesthetic isn't pulp or cheese so much as weirdness.
There's barley any semblance of storytelling, as well. Butler's in-game missions are a blur of hyperkinetic action devoid of any suspense, thus deflating his supposedly superhuman feat of enduring nearly 30 of them. Neveldine/Taylor wrote the script too, and inject some mild satire into the proceedings but it largely falls flat. Anything else they have to say about technology and society is uninspired (the film includes the obligatory horny male landwhale whose avatar is a sexy woman). Gamer's territory is so well-trod that the filmmakers think that if they zest things up with a song-and-dance number, nifty camera tricks, ADD editing, and a few lines of wacky dialogue, they can get away with sleepwalking through everything else.
At some point we need to remind ourselves that the era of cheese ended sometime in the mid-90's and will never return. Dark, gritty, and realistic is the prevailing aesthetic. That's certainly not a bad thing. God knows I don't want to watch another Batman and Robin. A modicum of credit goes to Neveldine/Taylor for thinking outside the box with a more-is-more philosophy that, unlike Michael Bay, they don't attempt to legitimize as respectable art. I've bumped Crank up on my Netflix queue with the hope that a qualified badass like Jason Statham as the lead helps the material. Making a solid, balls-to-the-wall action film isn't the most dangerous game, but it may be the hardest.
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