Perversely ingenious

Rating: Null/10 (28 December 1998)

THE GAME is pure pleasure. Michael Douglas plays Nicholas Van Orton, an upscale Scrooge placed into the Game, an elaborate series of sudden life experiences of escalating danger and intensity. The director, David Fincher, has made a movie about a man stripped of the security affluence and power provide. Yet he's done it by tweaking the protocol of film noir to serve his own cynical ideas about contemporary cultural-claustrophobia; the horror is how completely a "recreational" service can usurp a man's life and make it the corporation's plaything.
Fincher knows how silly this premise is, because he's also made a deftly existential, hall-of-mirrors stump-puzzle in which style and conviction count more than credibility. Are the Game's anonymous strategists trying to con Van Orton? Harm him? Which life events are games, and which are just life?
The mad-kick answers are far more satisfying than expected, with Fincher crafting the illusory suspense into a leisure-class nightmare of panic and confusion. Twisting a wealth-fixated Yuppie into a neo-noir hero is a shrewd move-exactly how much space is there between an icy investment banker and a laconic, Mitchumesque loner? This injection of modernity lends the film a surprising comedic thrust. We keep laughing that the control-freak is being controlled in ways never dreamed up by himself; the Game is so perversely ingenious and ruthless, even he's impressed.
ERIC BELTMANN