Well my coupla days stretched into a coupla months there.
I found a few other movies more worth my while in the meantime (such as
The African Queen).
Overall: not nearly as bad as Milo's insane medical students movie. I managed to watch the whole thing without a finger even hovering over the fast-forward button.
When you're forewarned what a brainless crapfest it is, it's fairly watchable. Michael C. Hall obviously had a blast playing a giggling creep that would give Dexter Morgan the heebie-jeebies. Gerald Butler was good in a grunting, personality-free action role; this is where he belongs, not in rom-coms!
I thought it was a tad unkind what he did to poor Milo, considering he was just another Society pawn; the guy (or gal) that Gerald should have killed was sitting safely in a game room somewhere. You'd think he'd have been a bit more sensitive about that. How'd he like the family members of some of his victims to come after
him for revenge? Better to send them after our Spiderman-elect who was actually doing the killing...
And speaking of that, I was incredulous that Logan Lerman's character was treated in such a sympathetic way by this movie! He's really a bigger villain than Ken Castle. It's rich idiots like him who keep this corrupt and disgusting game going.
Lerman's character is much more reprehensible than, say, the fat tub o' lard who is merely directing Amber Valetta to have sex with random guys (no girls? now I know this is sci fi!
). Amber's character must have known the job was essentially prostitution when she took it. She really couldn't find any other way to support herself? Eh.
Contrast that with Lerman's character - getting an innocent man into situations where he had to kill or be killed. He wasn't there by choice. Yet the cute, blue-eyed kid gets to be the big hero at the end and the tub o' lard is presumably whacked by tech support. Hollywood morality at its finest.
And then there's Hollywood logic. Apparently if you have a good "puppet" like Kabel, the player is a hindrance. So the game naturally would have evolved to players who are merely the owners of talented puppets, more like the owners of a horse in a horse race. That kinds spoils the logic of the game altogether, if the people paying to play are so useless.
Oh well, that's far more thought than this movie deserves. Like
The Box, there was a good movie in there somewhere, but it's too much effort to figure out how to fix such a total trainwreck.
