GAME ON!

Many people spend their Labor Day weekends at barbeques or down the shore. My devotion knows no bounds, though as I spent it at the movie theatre. Poor numbers from the box office also confirm that the near-empty theatres I sat in were not aberrations.

One of the movies that I tried to help gain revenue was Gerard Butler's new sci-fi action flick, Gamer. Set in the near future, nanotechnology has evolved to the point where it allows video games to become the ultimate form of escapism and entertainment as players no longer control digital avatars, but instead actual people.

Gerard Butler plays "Kable", a convict on death row for murder who is the star avatar in the most popular future first-person shooter game, "Slayers". The purpose of the game is if the player and his avatar can survive 30 matches in a row, the convict earns his freedom and the player basically is hailed like an A-list celebrity.

As "Kable" approaches his legendary 30th match, the mind behind the game, Ken Castle, realizes he can't let "Kable" win without having his darkest secrets revealed to the public and begins stacking the odds against "Kable" and his controller in a battle of digital wits.

Billed as more action than 300 and more originality than Death Race, this movie failed on both those fronts.

There were too few action sequences for this to be a full-fledged action movie and the few there were in the movie were much too short for my liking considering that these video games are supposed to be worldwide sensations and the biggest Pay-Per-View events in the history of television.

This movie was advertised as a 95-minute check your brain at the door blood fest and instead had a deep-rooted message about the dangers of technology and a sensationalistic existence. The relationship between "Kable" and his controller was barely explored at all and instead focused on "Kable" longing to be with his family and what he was fighting for.

This easily could have been a great buddy action flick with the difference being that the partners are really living one existence in the game and how they had to work together to take down the man. That concept could have been so much more entertaining than what Gamer ended up being.

The visuals were great, especially when describing the other sensationalistic video game, "Society", that was like a live-action Sims game, but with more gratuitous nudity. Aside from that there really wasn't enough to make this worthwhile to see in the theatre.

I look at Gamer and I think of wasted potential. The acting was good and the visuals were good, but when a movie is advertised as a hardcore action movie and comes across more as a preachy drama, I think you lost your mission statement at some point and therefore will lose your audience.

Because of the lack of originality and the lack of action, I can't in good conscience give this a good score. At best, this is a worthy rental on a slow weeknight, but not worth the price of admission at a theatre.

Gamer gets a 2 out of 5.

-Ray Carsillo