The Game (1997)

Director: David Fincher

Starring: Michael Douglas, Deborah Kara Unger, Sean Penn

After a wealthy banker is given an opportunity to participate in a mysterious game, his life is turned upside down when he becomes unable to distinguish between the game and reality.

Even turning off my brain cells didn’t  help making this more credible. A good cast, and a script that might have been interesting, but the film is overcome by its own ego.

It’s just chaos and mayhem upon more chaos and mayhem without so much as a breather. As if they had loads of ideas but didn’t really know how to implement them and then concocted this mess. Did they honestly expect me to just swallow all this garbage they fed me?

Look, Michael Douglas is an incredible actor. Although his performance is good – as usual – even he couldn’t save ‘The Game’ for me. This is taking an idea to the extreme, for the film and the premise. I’m not even going to highlight the improbabilities, because that would be the entire movie anyway. What happens for the sake of “a game” is just way too much for a one company to pull off. When the great reveal finally arrives there’s just too much involved for this to be believable. They even drove him into the f*king harbor in a locked car and expected him to remember he was given a handle so he could escape!!!!!  How long would they have waited to send help?? So this game can essentially cause someone’s death?? A lot revolves around Christine, but what was the guarantee that Nicholas would follow her? They set up props all around her – and EVERYWHERE else as it turns out – without the slightest knowledge that Nicholas would have been in the right place at the right time.

The finale is just preposterous – and here’s some spoilers, so stop reading if you don’t want to know. In the end Nicholas has a real gun, which wasn’t suppose to happen. He shoots Conrad, and assuming he killed his own brother – and having lost everything – Nicholas jumps off the roof. Later it is revealed Conrad even had props to make it look like he was shot. How did they know Nicholas would have a real gun? What if Nicholas had shot Conrad in the head, or stomach? Jumping off the roof, how did Nicholas conveniently jump off the EXACT spot so he could land where he was intended to? (Jim later makes a comment “I was supposed to drop you off the roof”, just to justify everything – NOT!! So, they’re willing to risk a prominent businessman’s life for a game??!) And they actually replaced a glass dome with fake glass!!! What??!!!

Would I watch it again? Most definitely not.