The Game (1997)

The movie starts off with a long (ish) home video and then we are introduced to Michael Douglas who plays Nicholas Van Orton who is an financier who doesn’t seem to have a particularly nice life. He almost reminds me of a tone down version of Gordon Gekko. In the film, he gets given a birthday present from him odd brother. He signs up to CRS which just screams wacko. After we are introduced to Nicholas and his brother the story spends a fair amount of time showing that CRS don’t seem the full ticket. The main question is just what is CRS offering and to be honest it’s a good question and it’s made even more intriguing because it Michael Douglas that its happening to. It’s not long until the story starts to unravel and the moment it goes weird is when Nicholas goes home and comes across the doll, then the TV starts talking to him. Things get even stranger when he encounters a waitress and after coming across a bloke on the floor the movie descends into a bit of a far fetched idea and whilst watching it I was thinking that it resembled North by Northwest a bit in that it stretches credibility a bit.

The film does have a strange curiosity to it as the question to what the game is. Things seem to be getting out of hand before the mad scene involves Nicholas and the house has been painted with ultra-violet paint and weird loud music.  When Conrad (Sean Penn) comes back into the story after appearing and leaving at the beginning, he seems somewhat more hysterical. He is very untrusting when he finds a glove compartment full of CRS keys. This leads to a nice scene between Penn and Douglas when they talk about stuff that has happened in their past.  After a good scene with Douglas being trapped in a taxi after it goes in the sea. When Douglas and the cops go to the CRS headquarters it has magically disappeared, that much was obvious.

What isn’t as obvious is what happens when Nicholas goes to see Christine. After smashing up the camera they had in the smoke detector, a bunch of men with guns come at then and attack them. It’s a great scene. After Christine tries to tell Nicholas whats going on there is a nice twist where we find out that Sam is in the con with CRS. All of a sudden Nicholas is dumped in the middle of mexico and spends several minutes getting back home where he finds his home is to be sold and it’s at this point he tracks down his ex-wife. The story climax’s with Nicholas shooting his brother by accident and in shock jumps off the top of a building and somehow manages to land on a pre-prepared crashmat. When he lands he discovers that his brother did this as a birthday present and he is in fact very much alive. Now if that were me then I wouldn’t just hug him, I would scream and shout at him and walk straight out. Nicholas acts like its just a small prank. The film easily falls apart when you start to think of the different scenarios that could have happened like if Nicholas had jumped off a different side of the building or if he’d hit something on the way down or even if he had shot his brother in the head instead of the chest.

The movie has two faces in it that are familiar to me. The first being Armin Mueller-Stahl (Anson Baer) and the second is Peter Donat (Sam Sutherland) who I know from the X-Files as Fox Mulder’s dad. Sean Penn is quite good and despite not being a big fan of the painfully indulgent actor I can’t deny that he wasn’t mesmerising on screen. Douglas is always good and he was especially good in this. As the lead female actor in the movie, Deborah Kara Unger was ok as Christine. She has a bit of an attitude to begin with but when she returns then she seems to have changed a bit.

This being a David Fincher film it was always good and Michael Douglas and Sean Penn carry the film well. You have to leave your senses at the door before seeing this because if you start to apply logic to this film then it becomes an absurd film but if your willing to look past this then it’s a perfectly fine film that flags a bit in the middle but picks up to a thrilling conclusion.