Gamer

For the most part, the action genre is a flailing, wheezing beast of suckitude. Most of the great action directors are on the steep downslop of their careers. Walter Hill hasn't made a straight action movie for over a decade. John McTiernan hasn't made a decent movie for nearly twenty years. James Cameron, after making two of the best action films of all time, The Terminator and Aliens, fell victim to George Lucas Disease: becoming so enraptured by emerging special effects technology that paltry considerations like story and character and even visceral impact fall by the wayside. Have you seen the Avatar trailer? Dude's been spanking it so vigorously to the revolutionary 3D digital cameras and whatnot that he has failed to notice that his aliens look like furry's Second Life avatars. And so Michael Bay and his pale imitators rule the action universe, spitting out massively budgeted, soulless monstrosities that hit the same tired beats and adhered to the same loud and dumb aesthetic.

And so it falls to the visionary writer-director team of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor to take the action genre into bold new territory. Neveldine and Taylor survey a cultural landscape of poisonous sensory overload and respond with action films that obliterate notions of restraint or coherence. The brilliant Crank films reach heights of surreal delirium, dumping prosaic concerns for plot and character in favor of operatic displays of violence and perversion, pushed to into the realm of the surreal. Crank 2, especially, points to a new wave of action films that embrace the over-the-top frenzied mayhem of video games, where logic and proportion fall sloppy dead and the parameters of good taste and the limitations of physical possibility have been shotgunned in the anus. Neveldine/Taylor movies are perfectly crafted for a generation coming of age with the stream of consciousness bloodletting of Grand Theft Auto.

Their new movie, Gamer, takes the Neveldine/Taylor video game aesthetic from sub-text to text. In a near future, nanotechnology allows video gamers to control actual human beings, either in a Sims-like world of wacky outfits and kinky sex, or in a hellish arena of deadly combat called "Slayers." It's a clever bit of future-casting: if the kids who were brought up watching The Rock went on to play Halo, then the kids who were brought up watching Crank went on to play Slayers. The cleverness somewhat helps make up for the fact that, plot and character wise, Gamer is pretty much identical to The Running Man. Gerard Butler is a wrongly-imprisoned death row inmate, forced to fight for his freedom in the Slayer death matches, which play like live-action sessions of Gears of War. He escapes with the help of a band of revolutionary hackers led by Ludicrous(!), who are out to bring down the techno-genius behind Slayer, a Bill Gates-type played with a nice mix of megalomania and nerdiness by Michael C. Hall. Gamer lacks the audacious one-upsmanship that makes the Crank films so giddily exhilarating, but it definitely ups the ante on surrealism. A climactic dance sequence featuring Hall and a bunch of mind-controlled goons in particular presents itself as a haunting and innovative touch. Unfortunately, there's more screen time devoted to Gerard Butler angsting it up over his family than him puking into gas tanks. Unconvincing emotional elements and recycled plot points are sooooo Michael Bay, guys. Let's get our heads back in the game.