good thriller, but flawed...SPOILERS galore in this review

Rating: 5/10 (2 January 2001)

"The Game" is a dark, tense, suspenseful thriller by David Fincher, the excellent director of "Fight Club" and "Se7en." "The Game" doesn't live up to either of those movies (which are some of the best to come out of Hollywood in the last decade). Michael Douglas gives a decent performance as Nicholas Van Orton, a fantastically rich investment banker. Sean Penn also does well as his younger brother Conrad.
Except for the last seven or eight minutes, the movie is gripping, exciting, and unpredictable. In short, everything you want in a thriller. But those few minutes change things considerably. --(this is where the spoilers come in)-- We learn that The Game was just an elaborate way to make Van Orton have a good time and rejuvenate his life. He is certainly grateful, kind, and appreciative to his brother for the gift, so we can assume that the experience really did change his life. However, we don't see a lot of other evidence to back this up. He does accept responsibility for his divorce, and he basically gets less uptight, more relaxed, and more able to enjoy his life.
My reaction to that was something like, "They went to all that trouble and took up 2 hours of my life so some jerk with a $600 million bank account can relax more"? This neutralizes a great deal of the movie's appeal as a thriller. Van Orton never really uncovers the secret for himself, they brought it to him. In fact, he was being manipulated throughout the course of the entire movie. There are a few loose ends that aren't resolved well: the snapshots in his hotel room, the graffiti in his house. The explanation for these turns out to be, essentially, that CRS was just jerking him around to make him scared.
"The Game's" ending is something of a cop-out. Rather than a top-notch surprise ending that really ties everything together (like in "The Usual Suspects" and "The Sixth Sense"), "The Game" has a sort of blanket explanation for everything weird that happened.
The ending is, at first, mind-blowing. But then you realize that all the great suspense and action added up to...well, nothing. For the two hours before you figure everything out, "The Game" is a superb thriller. After that, it loses its impact and becomes a disappointment.
Fincher still does an excellent job on the atmosphere of the movie, very dark and stylized. "The Game" is worth a look-see if you're a fan of Fincher or mysteries in general, but otherwise isn't such hot stuff.