Gamer (DVD Screening)

(Spoiler free)

After seeing Gerard Butler in the action heavy Olympus Has Fallen and 300, both sporting some brutal but unreal action sequences I figured that Gamer would be a safe bet. Even if it was just a dumb leave your brain at the door action flick I was up for that as long as it delivered the basic components of an action movie, oh how wrong was I.

Gamer is the most disappointing and crap film I have seen since White House Down last year.  Where to start, well firstly none of the characters are remotely likeable including Butler’s character Kable. I expected to at least like Kable, as he is presented as some badass action star of the game he is in, Slayers.  This is not the case, the action featured here is so rubbish. With the extent of the video games out there I was expecting some unreal game like footage however what you get is basically Kable running through several different scenarios actually doing very little.  There is one good action scene in the entire film, the one in which Kable manages to escape the game by stealing a car and breaching the restricted area, but this is literally the only good thing about this movie and the scene probably only lasts about a minute anyway.

Any good action movie needs a good villain, in Gamer you are presented with two candidates namely Michael C. Hall best known for his role as Dexter and Terry Crews. Neither of which are able to bring anything remotely noteworthy to this production.  Hall was just completely unconvincing and disappointing in general surprising because of his role as Dexter.  Whilst Crews was simply miscast here, he has been featured in too many comedic roles in recent years that I could not take him seriously as a credible villain. The rest of the cast was simply uninspiring however it was hardly their fault as Gamer is just a dire creation in general. The story possibly could have had legs however for the majority of the film I didn’t really have much of a clue as to what was going on but worryingly this really didn’t bother me and I seemed to know from about 10 minutes in that I had made a mistake watching this movie.

Some themes and scenes were actually quite disturbing as well, the way in which gaming culture was presented was really dark and a lot of the scenes featured in the society game in this movie were uncomfortable viewing, I am not criticizing the movie for including these themes but instead I am just saying that they were most definitely not to my taste and did not help this movie in the slightest. The worst thing about me watching this movie was that I actually tore myself away from Point Break to watch it, POINT BREAK!

BIGGEST FLAW – Pretty much everything

BIGGEST ACHIEVEMENT – That one scene I have mentioned above

Gamer is a real waste of time, action junkies will be left unsatisfied and I am sure that this is one effort that Butler will not look back on fondly. I struggle to find any benefit of watching this movie and really would not recommend it.

Rating – 1/10