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Oh, Gamer. Your premise is so gosh darned objectionable. Let's just get this over with. "Some years from this exact moment..." says some text as we get a uh... depressing metal version of Sweet Dreams Are Made of These? Seriously? We also have a lot of really unconvincing posters/billboards/electric signs/graphitic for our premise, which we're now showing some of, with jerky jittery, almost Real Player Quality footage of a bunch of dudes with guns shooting at each other. And at one point, "save point" is overlaid on this which uh... makes no sense at all. It's like, "hey, I think I heard my kid talk about videogames having something called save points in them? Let's put that in!" Similarly, someone just shouted about how someone just "@#$%ing tea bagged him!" in response to someone dying. Uh... yeah. That doesn't mean what you think it means movie. If you'd used that correctly, that'd be a hilariously unexpected instance of actually doing your research, but it doesn't mean killing someone. It means, in this context, killing someone, and then repeatedly squatting and standing over their face, miming a sex act. Coming back out to Evil Corporate land, someone also just seems to have used palindrome to mean idiot.
OK, so now we have this pseudo-news program explaining how this retarded premise was first applied to a game called Society, which is basically Second Life, except you're remotely controlling and watching real live humans and making them go through unconvincing looping dance animations, walk around talking to each other, or just have sex. Not featured: All the weird BSDM stuff associated with actual second life. Featured: Realistic floating name tags most of which are too filthy for me to relay, and of course, a quick boob flash. Anyway, the current awful premise of letting people control real live convicts killing each other started a year ago, as an alternative to seaving a life sentence for murder, people can be videogame characters, and if they survive 30 fights, get to go free. So... it's the exact same plot as Death Race, but instead of Mario Kart it's a team death match FPS. But for some reason instead of everything being a boring brown mess it's a boring grey mess. Also without free will. Also? Controlling people comes from injecting them with nanites that eat and replace their entire brains apparently, and then can get signals from the internet. And oh hey, it's John Leguizamo. Watch him be the one ray of sunshine in an otherwise completely irredeemable movie! It's kinda his thing.
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Also, it seems our main character is in jail for attempted suicide. Anyway yeah, like I was saying, this is a horrible premise. I mean, the whole Death Race/Running Man/Smash TV formula is pretty freaking stupid to begin with, but I kinda get it on its own. The original twist we're bringing here is that some random videogame player.. OK, hang on, I need to address the current scene. OK, we've got this crazy montage/music video (with lots of random boobs) of the other, Second Life game in action. Which is pretty darn goofy and wow it would be so much better if the movie were just about THIS instead. Anyway, this culminates with someone wearing a pig nose hitting on some random slutty girl. Cutaways to the people mind controlling these two show us how the girl is being played by a human version of Jabba the Hutt. Which is an old old gag, but at least it's being pushed to the extremes here.
Back to what I was saying before though? The original twist on our premise here is that what one can only assume is a mentally stable average 12-30 year old kid somewhere is controlling each of the convicts killing each other here. I have a hard time believing the average videogame would be at all willing to spend actual money to MURDER HUMAN BEINGS. I mean, seriously WTF? That's not even acceptable by movie morality. That's just... glorifying indiscriminate murder, flat out. I mean, I can see it if the sell was that this was just some really realistic looking videogame, and the reality that actual people were dying was a big surprise, but no. This is publicly advertised knowledge, and the kid controlling our main character here is being portrayed as a FRELLING SYMPATHETIC CHARACTER WITH STRONG MORAL FIBER! WHAT THE HELL MOVIE THAT IS SO FAR BEYOND NOT OK! The thing that I really find unsettling is that this movie ISN'T trying to make some big stand about how playing videogames desensitizes you and makes you a ticking time bomb ready to go on a killing spree. That'd be horrible too, but at least that would be ignorant people making propaganda, about which I could get righteously indignant and pull out a bunch of facts that totally disprove their claims. Here though, it's just... everyone involved with the production of this movie is a completely insane sociopath, who is just as ignorant of how videogames actually work and the psychology behind playing them as they'd be if it were propaganda on top of it.
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On which note, that's the other thing. Even if we ignore the morality here, who would want to play this? The control scheme is apparently a full body mime thing, and they actually make a point of noting that there's a lot of lag. The reason the main character does so well is that unlike most people he's semi-autonomous. And oh #@$% you movie! You just killed John Leguizamo? He'd barely had any screen time. Plus, he has the indignity of being a random wandering NPC janitor just forced to wander about through the middle of all the carnage. Anyway though, yeah, it controls terribly, visually it's actually pretty darn impractical, and I'm sorry, I just can't ignore the morality issue here.
Oh yeah, and we also have this terrible Johnny Mnemonic plot going on where a rapper turned actor keeps hacking into people's computers to yell angrily at them and preach anarchy. I should like these moments since this guy is the ONLY voice of sanity in this movie, but it's just so awful. And... oh hey, in addition to our script writer not knowing what a save point is (I believe the term they were looking for is level exit, which STILL makes no sense because this is clearly scored as a death match sorta thing), we're somehow saying that "mods" somehow aren't "cheating" with regards to giving the main character full autonomy to eliminate lag... which we're calling ping because we don't know what words mean and all. Oh, and this is rather ridiculous. Now that he's been given full autonomy, and the kid is just a cheerleader, he's totally incompetent. You would think direct control of his actions or not, muscle memory would help him to recall what he's doing. Anyway, this bit here is almost clever. He somehow got a bottle of vodka, chugged the whole thing, and then later found a truck and induced vomiting to puke it into an abandoned ethanol fueled truck's gas tank. OK, that'd kinda work. But then he tops it off by also urinating into it. Now, unless you have complete liver failure, there isn't going to be any alcohol content in your urine. At least not enough to be helpful here. I'm sure you'd be diluting it something fierce. So yeah, there's a car chase.
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Oh yeah, so we've got this subplot here. Lardo the Hutt's character in Second Life? Yeah, that's the main character's wife. Oh, but we're not dealing with that. Instead, main character has escaped and now has some girl with a motorcycle as a sidekick, who's whisking him off somewhere with no real information being given. Really, it's just a total stranger going, you need to come with me now! Ah, she's a member of the generic resistance, who hang out in an old arcade playing air hockey and quoting The Matrix. Oh, and their moral objection to all this? The guy who made these games is greedy and praying on the desperate poor people. Because yeah, that's totally the only thing at all wrong with any of this. So anyway, I guess now we're off to rescue his wife. Who is apparently is just a perfectly willing employee, who can quit being a fat guy's puppet any time he wants to, and even defended her career choice to a child services worker earlier. Currently, she's about to have sex with... Peter Petrelli? Wow, that was unexpected. He's not a very convincing actor here either, which I suppose is for the best, since we're implying his player is like, 12. Also, THERE'S the BSDMery we know from Second Life! Anyway, the main character bursts into the room and... severs Peter's spine apparently. Yeah, the random prostitute with no free will TOTALLY deserved to die for being forced to be about to sleep with her, that's totally acceptable! Anyway, then the bad guy, just this... full on serial killer who was hired to kill the main character because much like Death Race, we can't actually let someone WIN. Anyway, he's pursuing and totally trying to kill them. Also random other people because that's his thing. Jabba masturbates to the sight of innocent bystanders being killed, and even has wifey encourage him to continue. Then they run to take refuge in a full on people suspended from the ceiling on meat hooks bondage club, with crazy candy colors to everything. More innocent people die, and more creepy weirdos masturbate to this.
And now... dear gods. Is that... Keith David? You took a role in this piece of garbage too? Oh you deserve so much better than this man! Isn't your career finally starting to really take off? Can't you get better work? At least he's playing a cop who's trying to scare player kid straight, so, relatively, he gets to have SOME dignity. So now we're getting more matrixy, pointing out that anyone can see Le Resistance through Wifey's eyes until they inject her with de-brain-nanite-ification-ium. Wouldn't that apply to the main character too? Anyway yeah, she's disconnected now, and a bunch of goons immediately arrive at Jabba's house. Jabba by the way doesn't have some crazy VR rig, just a standard computer which, for some reason, has like 17 monitors, arranged in a way you could't possibly look at them all at once. Oh, so now we're using out magical Matrix technology to record the main character's old memories of how he was an original test subject for this technology and was forced to shoot his friend pint blank in the head and that's why he was in jail. I know I said suicide earlier, but that was just because 5 years ago Hollywood banned the use of workable camera angles and clear editing. At least with action movies. Or maybe it's just bad action movies. I mean, Kick Ass totally avoided jarring cuts and shakey cams, and that was pretty mainstream, right?
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Anyway, now it seems we have to go and rescue the main character's daughter, who was full on kidnapped by the evil CEO of the deplorable videogame company. Again though, it's not that his product is monstrous. It's just that he's corrupt and had early test subjects kill each other... for apparently totally arbitrary reasons. Oh and hey look! Apparently Mr. Evil CEO has a hit cartoon based on himself too! Yeah, that's totally realistic. Remember that hit show about the CEO of Activision that was all the rage last year? And... uh... OK. Suddenly we have our "hero" here wandering into the evil CEO's house, where he's suddenly confronted by the uh... cast of West Side Story, putting on a big elaborate song and dance number. Then they fight, and then he walks around for a nice pleasant chat with the CEO. He gives a big long villain speech about how HIS brain is full of nanites sent to send instead of receive... which is stupid since we explained that people can see through these people's eyes and implied there's maybe some force feedback too. But the idea is he can mentally control anyone in the world, and plans to, seriously, infect everyone with nanites and take over the world. For now though he's just having his goons kill the Matrix people, undo their restoration of his free will, and beating him up. Because it totally makes sense for this guy to be a trained kick-boxer type. Unbeknownst to him though, a surviving resisty type has turned on a life broadcast of the climax here to everyone in the world, AND begun restoring control of the main character to the kid who had it at the start of the movie. So, having him slit his 5 year old's daughter fails, and he instead ends up getting in a knife fight with the CEO. And somewhere in here that serial killer was unceremoniously killed if I failed to mention that. Anyway, point is, kid on the outside is the big hero, forcing the main character to stab some guy, causing cheers to ring out world wide. Then all the CEO's lackeys who had stadium seats to all this just walk out. The main character stops one and says wait, before you go set all the nanite slaves free! He just kinda shrugs and goes OK and does it. Then our happy family gets in a car and drives off to have a nice happy ending, with no horrible horrible psychological scars from being respectively murder and sex puppets. Naturally. And then it says GAME OVER INSERT COIN isn't that just HYSTERICAL? (Hint: No.)
That was PRETTY FRELLING TERRIBLE. I would say that was just flat out a completely irredeemable movie, but honestly, if we'd focused exclusively on the whole Second Life thing, and gutted the retarded "killing REAL people is the ultimate videogame right?" angle and the evil CEO stuff, just did it as a sociological science fiction deal, really getting into the morality and voluntary puppetry angle? That could be a decent movie. I'm not saying parts of that were in here or anything. All the Second Life scenes here were pretty much just an excuse to go BOOBS BOOBS BOOBS BOOBS Hey it's Peter Petrelli BOOBS. Incidentally, this movie was writer/directed by the same two crazy weirdos behind the Crank movies. Now, I can speak no ill of the Crank movies. I mean, I COULD but I appreciate them. That's just two sociopathic coke fiends creating fun pointless action movies with insane pacing and no logic behind them at all. This though, this they apparently made while SOBER and it really suffers for it. Also, I just have to check. There's a commentary track on this. Does it have any sort of deep insight into the symbology of the film? HAHAHANO. Does everyone in the room come off as being incredibly high? Yes. Do they also admit that this is really stupid and you shouldn't think too hard? Yeah. "[actor] complained that this scene didn't make any sense but we just told him it looks cool so just turn your brain off like the audience is supposed to." Oh, and I need to say, now that I'm looking at the beginning again? Yeah, I'm sorry. They DO know what tea bagging means, I just didn't catch it on my first viewing. Seriously though, the real problem here? There really wasn't a single memorable action scene in a movie which really has no other purpose than having them.
