Crank N' Mank #4 My World of Flops, Game Over Case File #192 Gamer (2009)
An image that truly conveys, “This is an action movie with Gerard Butler in it”
Crank and Crank 2: High Voltage co-writers/co-directors Neveldine/Taylor’s joint filmography is small but filled with gleeful trash that looks like it couldn’t possibly be anything less than mind-glowingly awesome.
The Crank boys directing a crazy steam-punk comic book western starring Josh Brolin? Holy shit, how could that not be the funnest shit ever? Yet 2010’s Jonah Hex, which Neveldine/Taylor wrote and were slated to direct before stepping down over creative differences isn’t even halfway watchable, let alone a kooky cult classic.
The prospect of Neveldine/Taylor directing a Ghost Rider movie with Nicolas Cage similarly inspired feverish anticipation and then crushing disappointment when Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance ended up fixing none of the problems of its underwhelming predecessor.
2008’s Gamer is another Neveldine/Taylor joint with a can’t miss premise that ended up missing pretty badly with critics and audiences alike.
I remember getting pretty damn excited when I learned that Neveldine/Taylor would be making a movie about a dystopian society where gamers control flesh and blood human beings in a bread and circus spectacle dreamed up by the world’s richest, most powerful and, by extension, evil man.
It felt like Neveldine/Taylor were doing their version of The Running Man, with some Southland Tales and The Matrix thrown in for good measure.
Then Gamer came out and seemingly no one liked it. It didn’t get good reviews. It didn’t find a cult. Even fanboys who dug the Crank movies shrugged apathetically and dismissed it as a blown opportunity.
Gamer’s reputation is so abysmal that it initially surprised me just by virtue of not being terrible. Yes Gamer initially leaps over the very low bar I had set for it with an enjoyably trashy immersion in the future, Neveldine/Taylor-style.
Dexter’s Michael C. Hall is a whole lot of fun as Ken Castle, the aforementioned world’s richest and most powerful man, a tech mogul who owes his incredible fortune to two games that have collectively conquered the world.
There’s Society, an amped-up version of The Sims that allows the sensation-hungry rabble of the future to escape their empty lives by controlling real people in tableaus that look like a cross between a rave, the set for Club MTV and a Fifth Element-themed costume party.
It’s a junky, trashy, tacky pocket universe for the escapism-hungry likes of Gorge (Ramsey Moore), a mean-spirited parody of gamers who assume the identities of sexy young women in make-pretend worlds yet are sweaty, clammy mountains of naked, unwashed flesh in real life.
If Society is for what just barely passes as living, then Castle’s other Cash Cow, Slayers, is all about dying, or at least killing and being killed in video game tradition.
In Slayers players control real-life death row inmates as they shoot their way through a series of blood-soaked, achingly familiar tableaus. If one of the damned succeeds in winning 30 consecutive battles they receive the ultimate prize: freedom.
Gerard Butler stars as Slayers’ reigning champion, a battle-scarred veteran who has won a record twenty-seven battles, leaving him just three more to go before he can taste sweet, sweet freedom.
As an even more overtly evil version of Willie Wonka/Mark Rylance in Ready Player One, Ken Castle is a cold, dispassionate, brutally ambitious and power-hungry Steve Jobs with some Duke Phillips thrown in for good measure.
Hall is clearly having a blast chewing scenery as the malevolent dungeon-master/game-master of a profoundly fucked futuristic world. Then he disappears from the film for a good forty minutes. Gamer suffers terribly in his absence, but not quite as much as it does from Butler’s central presence.
Jason Statham, Neveldine/Taylor’s leading man of choice, possesses a number of qualities Gamer’s leading man desperately needs and fatally lacks. Statham possesses a light touch, a sense of humor about himself and a dry, understated understanding of the fundamental ridiculousness of the action movie realm.
That’s the fundamental problem with Gamer: it’s torn between being a loopy science-fiction social satire about a future where all of capitalism’s worst qualities have metastasized and a generic action movie where Gerard Butler has to kill a bunch of bad guys to save his wife and daughter or whatever.
Chris “Ludacris” Bridges costars as Brother, the leader of a revolutionary group called The Humanz who are at war with Ken Castle and what they correctly see as his sinister efforts to remove the human element from humanity and human kind and replace it with something cold and digital that he can use to enslave the masses.
Brother is one of many elements of the film that promises more than it can deliver. The idea of Ludacris, one of our funniest and most charismatic rap and pop stars, as a futuristic cross between Che Guevera and Max Headroom seems irresistible but Ludacris delivers a strangely subdued performance.
Terry Crews is much more magnetic and combustible as Hackman, a glowering mass of writhing muscles and homicidal rage. He’s a killing machine without a player controlling his actions that Ken Castle put in the game specifically to kill our underwhelming hero.
Crews has extraordinary presence, and a scene where he taunts his opponent with a slow, ominous version of “I’ve Got No Strings” from Pinocchio is full of pitch-black humor and personality.
Neveldine/Taylor fill the fringes of this weird, vulgar world with funky details but are defeated at every turn by the charisma void at the center of the movie.
Ken Castle returns in a big way late in the film’s third act, lip-syncing malevolently to a Sammy Davis Jr rendition of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” alongside a ghoulish assemblage of mind-controlled flunkies but his return is not quite enough to save the movie from itself.
For its first act I was pleasantly surprised by Gamer. It was pretty much exactly what I’d hoped it would be: a goofy, giddy, darkly comic romp with a decidedly retro, Cannon feel. By the time the movie wrapped up in about eighty-five minutes, however, I thoroughly understood why a seemingly foolproof cult movie failed to attract a cult.
Gamer never quite overcomes the Gerard Butler factor. He’s just too generic and boring. Neveldine/Taylor crank up the weirdness and live-wire energy but their stiff of a leading man just keeps pulling things down to earth.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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