Gamer

Gamer
2009 | Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor

Gamer is a science fiction/action thriller film. In the near future, mind-control technology has taken the world by storm. We no longer use computer generated graphic, the players can use their mind to control another human being implanted with special nano technology which replicates a part of human’s brain and acts like a receiver to manipulate human’s thoughts and movements from the command sent by the control center.

A game so-called ‘The Society’ becomes so popular, a player pays to control another human inside a limited territory.Aanother group of human get paid to be controlled by the players. It’s like a win-win situation.

Then Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall ), the mastermind behind this creation takes the game into another level, he calls it ‘Slayers’ which allows players to control death-row prisoners in a massive scale war zone killing each other for real. Any inmate who lives through 30 matches will be given freedom as prize, but nobody has ever survived.

Kable (Gerard Butler ), an ex-soldier has won 27 matches so far. Castle is planning to terminate him before he could reach the last match.

The plot is great, the cast is okay. But the script and direction sucks. The opening sequence is totally crappy. It was my mistake that I did not check the name of the people behind this film before I went to see it in cinema. Gamer is directed by Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor, the writers of Pathology. This time they didn’t just write idiotic script, they leveled up to direct the film. No wonder they can come up with such a great plot then smash it into oblivion like their previous work.

The only scene that I like is the creepy dance routine by Ken Castle, that is an unexpected moment. Milo Ventimiglia a.k.a. Peter Petrelli (Heroes) and the main actor of Pathology also features a tiny role in this film. Extremely boring, they really really really should stop making stupid film with the ending like “Super villain finally fights a hero with bare-hands.” This is 2009, please be more creative.