Like a Ferrari without the engine.

Rating: 5/10 (14 September 2014)

Let me start by saying the film has good atmosphere. The usual murky dark-brown tones that David Fincher is so good at. And Michael Douglas plays well, although the part is so familiar to him it's a bit like Bambi playing Bambi. Still, he pulls it off.
But then there is the story itself. So it's a game. Or is it? Or isn't it? Or is it? Or...oh well, you get the picture. The film starts off quite promising with millionaire banker Nicolas van Outen slowly being sucked into strange and gradually more and more dangerous situations. He is not sure who he can trust and whether the game is either real or if he's being screwed by some criminal organization. He gets more and more paranoid as he discovers that people he thought he could trust turn out to be in on it as well. All this is quite interesting when the viewer also believes that the game is not really a game but some kind of a con.
But the ending is such a disappointment that i find it hard to believe anything that happened in the 2 hours leading up to the plot twist, that really isn't a plot twist at all. The game turns out not to be a game at all until we find out that it was just a game after all. When we find this out, everything we have seen turns out to be as unbelievable as a fairy tale. And i guess that is what this movie is: a fairy tale. Filled with incredible plot holes and far-fetched situations that could have gone wrong at any given time. Nicolas could have died in the taxi, killed himself making that ridiculous jump in the end (what if he chose to jump off the other side or cut his neck open on the glass in those 2 ceilings?) or if he decided to buy a real gun because the creeping paranoia blurring his rational thinking? It's simply too nonsensical.
So in the end the film looks good, sounds good and is well played but far too unbelievable to leave me satisfied.