Gamer

Weird. I watched The Wackness yesterday, and today I saw Gamer... both have Aaron Yoo. Who? Exactly. Even more strange is that a few days after seeing THIS movie I watched NICK AND NORA'S... and he's in it. ALSO, I saw FRIDAY THE 13TH just a few months ago. This is weird.

The duo that brought me Crank then made this movie, and after that made Crank 2. Now, Gamer has been bumped off the shelf and thrown into the September "movie dump" month bin. I can't say I was as engrossed with this installment as I was with the Crank series.
As expected, there is so much quick-cam and shaky camera work that I can't even see what's going on half the time. I wouldn't mind this so much, but there were a couple of hotties that I would have liked to have had a couple seconds to "soak in" visually. Also, there are several times where what's happening on screen goes by so quickly - important stuff - that it's nearly impossible to register somewhat important details. Other times, I just wanted shit to stop MOVING enough for me to sink in the overly excessive sensory overload. Where it worked well enough in Crank, it almost never works in anything else. In this case, not even by the makers of said movie.

The premise is simple enough. It's a vehicle for Gerard Butler (Kable) to kick lots of ass. I laughed at some of the nods to several things. Most obviously, video games. "Society" - the game - is a lot like Playstation's "HOME", except the avatars are humans. There were also references to Crank, such as some naked women inside plastic bubbles. Or, Kable's gamer wearing a T-shirt that said "Crank" on it. Haha. An outfit chosen for an avatar in "Society" is an obvious nod to Blade Runner's Pris. Most of these nods were amusing.
Butler wasn't all that bad as Kable for what he was given. Ludacris was also pretty decent, and in fact everyone else wasn't so bad themselves. My only drawback was Michael C. Hall's over-the-top accent and performance. To say you didn't like something in this movie because it was "over-the-top", then I'm probably watching the wrong movie. Then again, I just didn't find it to be all that fun or tolerable. I did enjoy the "Under My Skin" skit. Hell, even Terry Crews was even pretty good. John Leguizamo was pretty useless.
Outside of being sick of the unending quick-editing and shaky camera work, I wasn't too fond of the action scenes. Reason being... the editing. And quick camera work. Half the time I wouldn't even see what was happening, and there were also difficulties in knowing the simple LOCATION of a character or vehicles. I couldn't tell where people were going or where they were coming from half the time. Even in NON action scenes it was hard to see what was happening. This was pretty frustrating.

Gamer was overall an average movie. There was some ok action, and I had a few good laughs. It's not going to change the world or win over any new fans if this kind of movie isn't their thing. That's about it.

GRADE: C