Gamer

Saw Gamer. It was really dumb. It wasn't playfully dumb, like some other action films. It was insultingly dumb. The plot is that in the future (and for some reason known only to the writers) people have grown tired of playing games starring virtual people and have moved on to playing with real-life humans as their avatars. The human-avatars have been given some kind of implant that controls their motions from afar. Ok? So the protagonist is a jailbird who is an avatar in some FPS-game which is exactly as stupid as shit. One battle takes place in a dirt-bike course, where people are riding bikes around... WHILE ON FIRE!!! His wife, meanwhile, is in some Second Life-style game where (and this is actually fairly accurate and intelligent) mostly people go to have simulated sex. So, this sets up the dual affront on the viewer's mind: either we are watching growling men shoot at each other or we're watching fluorescent-haired skinny people having sex. There's a lot of tits in this film.

The film is clearly a derivative of Death Race. Both have the same distasteful Mountain-Dew-ification of video games coupled with a complete lack of faith in the human race, idiotically assuming that what are essentially WWE events would take the world by storm and somehow become important in some sociopolitical sense. (Also bewildering that so much credit and adulation would be heaped onto the jailbird. Surely he's the avatar, right? I mean, we all love Mario but we give credit the the player for killing Bowser, right? But I digress.) It also has a leader of La Resistance who stutters and gibbers in a style clearly inspired by Max Headroom's obnoxious shenanigans.

La Resistance, by the way, is lead by this Malcolm X sort of Angry Black Man. The film has three black characters with speaking roles and they are all Angry Black Men. There's the la-resistence-leader, who (stutteringly) speaks in a declamatory way to us, his "brothas and sistas," there's an angry, threatening cop (played by the voice-actor for Goliath,) and another player-avatar played by Terry Crews (the Old Spice guy) who seems to be channeling some kind of bear for most of his scenes. I suspect this film is kind of racist. That's not that surprising however. The rest of the film displays an utter disinterest in treating people like human beings and not like tit and explosion delivery systems. Everyone is fairly obnoxious. I don't know who we're supposed to root for. Literally everyone in the film is straight-up obnoxious or just devoid of personality.

I don't want to write off the film completely, because I very obviously was not the intended audience for all of this. Then again, I don't really know who the intended audience was meant to be. 12-year-old boys perhaps? Unhappy men? I think it's safe to say that if you enjoy professional wrestling, then you might like this film. If you can ignore or enjoy the creepy, cartoon masculinity on display then maybe you'd dig it. I just hated it.