Suspenseful and Thought-provoking.

Rating: Null/10 (16 October 2000)

I saw David Fincher's The Game last night on TNT and have to say it was for the most part a pretty satisfying experience, although as others have noted, the ending, which I won't give away, does not exactly fit the preceding two hours or so, because it has a bit of a cop-out, wrong-note, life-affirming sort of feel to it. Michael Douglas, who has emerged as perhaps Hollywood's best lead actor in the middle-years range, gives one of his most impressive performances. He plays a wealthy San Francisco investment banker here, but while this guy may be as corporate-greedy as Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's socially concerned Wall Street (1987), Nick Van Orton is a character you can sympathize with as his wayward younger brother, played by Sean Penn, tempts him to re-awaken a side of himself that his life as a powerful capitalist has apparently deadened. The thing that is supposed to change his life is The Game, an experience custom-tailored to participants by a nebulous corporation called Consumer Recreation Services (CRS). Van Orton's curiosity impels him to submit to CRS's psychological and physical testing without even knowing what the exact nature of The Game---its rules, its object---actually is. In a scene alluding to Kubrick's 1971 version of Anthony Burgess' 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, Van Orton is stuck in a dark projection room being fed an endless series of unrelated images interlaced on the screen with suggestive words. Before he knows it, Van Orton is plunged into a non-stop sequence of experiences, more life-threatening than life-enhancing as his brother had promised, precipitated by the pretty good Deborah Unger as Christine, a waitress at a swanky restaurant. As Van Orton is confronted by a series of weird events, such as finding a life-sized clown doll lying on its stomach on the drive outside his mansion, an image deliberately designed to evoke for him the childhood memory of seeing his father commit suicide by throwing himself off their roof, he begins to question whether CRS is really in the private entertainment industry or has he been set up. Is CRS some kind of scam designed to bilk him of his fortune? Can he trust Christine, who is thrown into the non-stop action along with him? Is his brother in on it, too? Fincher's breathless direction keeps you riveted to your seat waiting to find out how this will all be wrapped up. Proof that this picture is so engrossing for a wide array of tastes is that I saw it at my mom's and she ended up enjoying it as much as I did, even though I took her to see last year's Fight Club, also by Fincher, and she ended up walking out of the theater by the end of the first half hour of that picture, saying, "I'll wait for you outside. This is disgusting." Well, I loved 1999's Fight Club, which was much better than the ridiculously overrated American Beauty, and for me, after having seen The Game, I think Fincher is in the top handful of the best Hollywood directors to come out of the last decade. While The Game is not as darkly subversive as Fight Club, it explores some of the same themes and concerns, such as the emotional emptiness and social disconnectedness engendered by the single-minded pursuit of wealth and the need to find something drastically outside the "mainstream" in order to get back in touch with the primordial self, as well as the paranoia unleashed by the rapid pace of computer technological change. For people who say that the somewhat sappy wrap-up at the end makes them feel "cheated," they ought to consider that this movie makes you think while at the same time taking you for a rip-rollicking, good suspenseful-thriller ride. Not too many movies come along all that often that can do that.