The Game
(Region 1 NTSC DVD)
(1997)
review by  Died With Boots On

Players Wanted. Right from the outset, your eyes and ears become victim to a gloomy, overcast euphony that resonates with Howard Shore's ill-lighted piano hymns. A beautifully shot curtain raiser that features our protagonist's,Nicholas Van Orton's (Michael Douglas), home-films from his childhood. Even then his facial expressions bleed with loneliness.The flashback film ends with his father's suicide, as he plunges from the roof of his palatial chateau. The film then cuts to the familiar desolate setting of the mansion as a now middle-aged Mr. Van Orton slips on his thousand dollar shoes. A callous, disagreeable San Francisco banker (the likes of Mr. Scrooge), worth about $600 million, and heir to his father's empire, radiates with apathy and indifference.

He's greeted by and deflects a barrage of "Happy Birthday's" as he makes his way into his luxurious office reminiscent of a hotel suite. A smile finally emerges from his perturbed face when his secretary, Maria, informs him of a reservation for two under the name "Seymour Butts" that was placed at a local five-star "millionaire's club" restaurant, and that inquired his presence. Without having to ask, he realized he was to meet his brother, Conrad, (Sean Penn) who had long ago surrendered to addictions of all kinds and proved unfit to run his father's business.

After posing the rhetorical question, "What do you get for the man who has everything?" Conrad slides a birthday card across the table where Nick receives it unenthusiastically. Inside is an invitation play The Game. Developed by a company called "Consumer Recreation Services", the game is "a profound life experience" that "provides whatever is lacking" in a person's existence. Beyond making obtuse statements like it's "an experiential book-of-the-month club," no one is willing or
able to describe the game in any detail to Nick. Having had his
interest piqued, he gives in to curiosity and pays a visit to CRS where he is met by Jim Feingold (James Rebhorn), and succumbs to his charm and charisma. After spending most of his day taking tests and filling out surveys that ask if he takes pleasure in hurting small animals and if he feels guilty while he masturbates, he then moves on to an insanely rigorous physical that actually involved working out. He's then subjected to some form of stimulus/ response test as he sits in a theater while graphic images are flashed before him, ensued by the revelation of a word best describing the gruesome clips. When all is said and done, he receives a message from CRS that explains how he has failed the tests and that they were sorry for any inconveniences they have caused.

Thoroughly pissed off, he walks out on a meeting and drives back to his residence where he plans a long lonely evening of watching the nightly news and indulging in a few mixed drinks. Upon pulling into his circular driveway, he swerves around what appears to be a dead body lying facedown under the highest part of the roof. Startled, Nicholas has a flashback of his father jumping from the roof and landing precisely where this body is lying. Nick flips the lifeless corpse over, only to reveal the makeup and adornments of a marionette clown. After this incident, CRS appears to be following through on their end of the bargain, infiltrating every corner of his life, to deliver a "profound life experience," one that may result in his own death.

Clearly I'm no reviewer. However, when a movie crops up from the cesspool of cinema that we wade through all too often, and it's also missing from the site's already voluminous archive, I feel the adrenaline fueling my motivation to physically uproot myself from the television and to sit before my computer, tearing out the internet cable to eradicate frivolous distractions, but mostly porn. The mere fact that I am writing this at 3:30 in the morning should tell you that either I have insomnia, or David Fincher's The Game is a thrilling sensation, possibly both.

Alfred Hitchcock used the term "refrigerator movie" to describe films like this, which are well-paced thrillers that work effectively while being watched, but fall apart upon later examination (while "standing in front of the refrigerator"). This is by no means a praiseworthy statement. The plot holes that the movie flaunts can be excused within the final minutes of the film where a string of dialogue orated by Deborah Kara Unger, who plays an accident-prone waitress, illuminates the purpose of The Game and inconspicuously caps any untied ends. Please, for the love of God, watch the two hour and eight minute movie all the way through.  There are several "false endings" in The Game, but please soldier on.  Take my word for it.

Entrancingly shot and faultlessly directed, not to mention Michael
Douglas's propensity to play the character of Nicholas Van Orton, a man initially cool and reserved then gradually less and less sure of himself and his circumstances, The Game is all that a thriller should be, and more. Only two years after Se7en and seven years before Saw, this movie falls in the ranks of these crime thriller leviathans. It even offers one of the most kaleidoscopic psychoactive scenes I've beheld in a movie since Pink Floyd's The Wall. Top-notch. Best put by an acquaintance of Mr. Van Orton, "John best describes The Game in chapter nine, verse twenty-four:

'Once I was blind and now I can see.'"