"This is your game Nicholas, and welcome to it."

Rating: 7/10 (17 June 2018)

What I'll say about "The Game" is what I say about a lot of action/thriller films. As you're watching, the story engages with an innovative concept, uses clever twists and delivers excitement at a visceral level. But then, when you have time to reflect on the story, it kind of falls apart when you consider what would have been required to pull it all off. This one relied on Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) to make the decisions precisely that he did, especially at the very end when his attempted suicide was thwarted to put an end to the game. How did the 'Game' manipulators know he would even think of something like that? Sure they ran that psychological profile, but by the time came when he shot his brother Conrad (Sean Penn), Van Orton's judgment would have been severely put to the limit to act rationally.
There's also the complexity of the set-ups, which would have required months of planning and getting the right players in place to pull off the Game. No way could it have been rigged during the amount of time allotted for Van Orton to begin the game as soon as he signed off on it. And how about a situation like the one in which the taxi driver bailed and the cab plunged into the river? One assumes that the assassin bullets were blanks and the shattered objects that were hit were set off with miniature explosives, but how would you explain Van Orton making his way out of the sinking cab in time to avoid drowning? It all requires a major suspension of disbelief to view the events happening on screen as if they were actually possible.
And finally, who would have come up with the price tag for this extraordinary con job? Conrad didn't appear to have the means to pull it off, which leads us to the idea that Nicholas Van Orton would probably have had to foot the bill to scare the living crap out of himself. With that kind of money, he could have gotten himself a real birthday present.