Gamer (Dir: Neveldine/Taylor)

Big spoilers below. But many of my readers will want to avoid this unsettling exploitation pic anyway. I saw it so you don't have to.

"Gamer" employs a fence-sitting plot of many exploitation films that both bemoans dehumanizing violence and revels in it. In the future, we force our death row inmates to participate in violent games in order to entertain us and possibly secure their freedom. Director(s) Neveldine/Taylor ("Crank" and "Crank: High Voltage") like so many exploitation filmmakers before them reveal the inherent evil of the system by focusing their film on a noble participant (Gerard Butler) wrongly accused and framed by the system. So maybe letting death row inmates kill each other isn't so bad--look at all the neat explosions and kill shots--but it's certainly bad in the instances when it snags a hero and a family man. We don't need a more humane outlook on justice. Just better quality control.

But the co-directors do add an interesting, if unpleasant, wrinkle in the film's subplot which follows the hero's wife and her participation in "The Sims"-like game Society. Society allows players to select a living, breathing avatar to exploit in whatever way they see fit--usually sexual escapades. Like the violent game in which the hero participates, the film both revels in the prurient results as well as criticizes them. These scenes, however, are so unsettling and vile--particularly the site of a nearly naked morbidly obese laughing at the pain he inflicts from afar--that the film seems to more successfully execute a critical position by making us sick to our stomachs. Engaging in the exploitation here makes the viewer queasy and more than a little guilty, sad.

The directors jettison their soapbox in the climax, however, which gives the villain his violent comeuppance while the whole world/moviegoing audience watches and cheers. The message: Enjoying violence is okay as long as its victims are bad people. This moral is as old as the cave walls, but Neveldine/Taylor seem prepared to criticize this position by making a film that is so disturbing as to wake us to our willingness to dehumanize in the name of entertainment and the pursuit of justice. But they throw this all out the window in the end and reveal that the prurience was the point, an end unto itself, and what we're rewarded for the price of admission.