The 1994 Most Dangerous Game Variation Surviving the Game is Buseytastic!
When I was a video store clerk at Blockbuster in the early to mid-1990s, people would rent Surviving the Game, and I would think, “Why would anyone rent this? It’s not supposed to be good.”
I was a mere child then, so I had a child-like faith in the rightness of professional film critics. As someone who would become a professional film critic myself, I should have known better.
I should have trusted my taste and my instincts rather than the critical consensus. I love character actors, and Surviving the Game features a murderer’s row of heavyweight character actors playing gleeful murderers.
A smartly-cast Ice-T stars as Jack Mason, a homeless Seattle man who loses the only two things he cares about—his dog and Hank (Jeff Corey), his destitute best friend—on the same cursed day.
Mason is so distraught that he attempts suicide but is saved by Walter Cole, a soup kitchen volunteer with an evil covert agenda. As cannily played by Charles S. Dutton, Walter exudes kindness and basic decency. He initially comes off as a humanitarian willing to give a desperate man a much-needed break.
Dutton’s natural warmth makes the revelation that his character is, if anything, even sicker and more evil than his murderous compatriots all the more shattering. In that respect, his performance echoes Samuel L. Jackson’s unforgettable turn as a slave who delights in making the lives of his fellow slaves worse in Django Unchained.
It’s impossible for a movie about a group of rich white hunters hunting an impoverished black man for sport with Walter’s sinister assistance to not have an overt racial aspect.
This would be true even if the film’s light-skinned African-American hero didn’t darken his skin using dirt as camouflage to avoid detection and obliteration. Then again, Surviving the Game is yet another cinematic variation on Richard Connell’s classic short story, The Most Dangerous Game.
Like every variation on Connell’s oft-told tale, including the previous year’s Hard Target, Surviving the Game is overtly also about money, class, and privilege, and the murderous iniquities of a capitalist system where those on the bottom are considered worthless.
Dutton’s savvy schemer hips the angry, depressed widower to a mysterious job as a hunting guide that doesn’t pay particularly well (500 dollars a week) by any standards other than that of a suicidal homeless man.
Mason accepts the job because he desperately needs the money but also because he doesn’t have anything else to live for. Everything in the world that he loves, including his wife and kids, has been taken from him.
Walter introduces Mason to Thomas Burns (Rutger Hauer), a wealthy businessman with truly unfortunate hair and a manner that’s supposed to be patrician and paternal but is instead creepy.
Even if we did not know, going in, the unusual nature of the gig Mason has unwittingly signed up for, it would still be apparent that something was very wrong with the hunters on account of how evil they all seem.
In addition to Hauer and Dutton, the hunting party includes Gary Busey as "Doc" Hawkins, a CIA psychiatrist who has the bright idea of livening things up a little by hunting the most dangerous game.
Mason tells Hawkins that he does not seem like a guy who makes his living listening to the problems of the very wealthy. That is true in the sense that Busey gives off crazy vibes that can be detected from space.
Though he is prominently featured on the poster and in advertising, Busey does not have much in the way of screen time. The Oscar-nominated character makes the most of his brief but memorable role, most notably in the form of a lengthy monologue about how his sadistic father forced him to hunt his own dog for sport that Busey apparently wrote himself.
The speech is delivered in one long take the night before everything goes awry. Director Ernest Dickerson, who directed the terrific Tales From the Crypt spin-off Demon Knight the next year, has justified faith in the abilities of his stacked cast.
Busey is a mere Oscar nominee. The film boasts a bona fide Academy Award winner in F. Murray Abraham as Derek Wolfe Sr., a Wall Street tycoon who believes in making a killing in business and all other aspects of his life.
If this guy likes it then I’m in!
Derek Wolfe Sr. is accompanied by Derek Wolfe Jr., a shallow child of privilege played by William McNamara. He’s the only member of the hunting party who does not realize going in that they’ll be hunting human beings instead of deer or lions but he learns that his participation is not optional and that no one cares about his ethical concerns.
John C. McGinley rounds out the hunting party as John Griffin, an oil tycoon who never got over his daughter’s murder. McGinley plays someone who initially appears to be the craziest and most blood-thirsty hunter.
Throughout the film’s first act, McGinley sports a crazed expression that silently but insistently conveys, “I derive a sexual sense of satisfaction over the prospect of murdering another human being.”
He’s not just macho; he’s unhinged. His incoherent anger and rage are downright feral. John initially appears to be the most bloodthirsty and amoral of the movie’s rogues gallery of villains, but he ultimately proves to be the most moral and the only one capable of change or moral growth.
After a celebratory dinner designed to lull Mason into a false sense of confidence about his new job, he’s given a brief head start before rich degenerates who paid fifty thousand dollars apiece for the privilege of hunting man begin their pursuit.
Walter chose Mason because he knew he would challenge them. He did not realize just how staunch that challenge would prove to be.
Hunters soon become the hunted, and the hunted becomes a hunter when Mason begins picking off the hunting party one at a time.
Surviving the Game presents class warfare at its most literal. Mason soon finds himself in an all-out war with his well-heeled pursuers. He’s outnumbered and outgunned but he proves a wily adversary who wracks up a body count instead of dying as planned.
The challenging lead role affords Ice-T to act and play a real character instead of coasting on his superstar charisma. It would not be accurate to say that Ice-T disappears into the role because he has such distinctive cadences and mannerisms, but this is about as close as he gets to being a thespian.
Ice-T has to up his game not to be blown away by a battery of tough-guy character actors all chewing scenery and trying to upstage each other.
I’m perversely curious about the widely maligned Cops & Robbersons because it marked a reunion of Chevy Chase and his Fletch and Fletch Lives director, Michael Ritchie.
I’m a big Ritchie fan and am fascinated by its status as one of Palance’s only post-Oscar vehicles, but I was rooting for Surviving the Game.
It turned out to be exactly what I was hoping for and expecting: a rock-solid action thriller with elements of social commentary, a fantastic cast, a sturdy premise, and a skilled director.
The mid-1990s witnessed quite a boom in The Most Dangerous Game adaptations. Surviving the Game is not as good as John Woo’s masterful Hard Target, but it is several million times better than the John Leguizamo vehicle The Pest, which I am perversely fascinated by because it is such a bewilderingly terrible motion picture, though that is setting the bar awfully low.
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