A little too fast but entertaining
I'm a Gerard Butler fan, so I would have given this at least a 3-star anyway just for having him in it. Upgrade to a 4-star for Michael C. Hall as the bad guy, which I loved and which was (aside from Dexter) probably one of my favorite of his performances. The reason I'm choosing to give it a 5-star rating is because although it is at times both mentally hard to watch (hanging people from hooks in the ceiling by their skin, seriously?) and physically hard to watch (strobe light effects, anyone?), and the story moves a little too quickly for any real character development, that rapid fire pacing has an endearing quality to it because for me it harkened back to the age of comic books. Not graphic novels, mind you, where the writer and the artist had basically an entire book's worth of pages to tell a story and let you get to know the characters in minute detail. But the one-shot comics where everything moved so fast that you got caught up in the action and were finished before you really had time to think about how little you really knew about the characters. Like those one-shot comics, 'Gamer' wraps you up in the slash'n'hack world of the 'Slayers' game right away and makes it very hard for you to pull out and ask, "So, who are these people, really?" But, also like one-shots, the movie does it's best to squeeze in the answers to that question wherever possible. It maybe doesn't fully succeed, but it comes very close. We get a sense of the main characters to the point that we can at least understand where they are coming from and why they're doing what they're doing. The second-string characters get a little definition, just enough so that they are useful to the plot line, even if we're still left scratching our heads and wondering, "Okay, so... where exactly did you come from again?" In addition, the concepts brought up in this futuristic film are mind-bending enough to at least get your brain thinking. In a move akin the one taken by 'Idiocracy', the movie makes us pause for a second after the film is over and makes us ask, "Wow, is that where our society could be headed? Are we opening ourselves up for that kind of a world by the actions we are choosing today?" 'Gamer' may not be the best quality piece of cinema or storytelling ever created, but it has its bright spots right alongside the bad. It's definitely the type of movie you pick up when you just want to watch something, not when you are looking for a mind-blowing cinematic experience or phenomenal storytelling. (Go find a foreign film or something.) But I would challenge viewers to watch this movie and, rather than sitting through it and nitpicking out every little detail that they hate, to try to see some good points: an awesome performance on the part of the villain; a good (if not amazing) and relatively easy to relate to protagonist in Kable; a concept that, if not totally original, is still terrifying on a subconscious level; and some truly hilarious moments just waiting to be appreciated. Read more
