Fincher comes of age...

Rating: 10/10 (7 July 1999)

"The Game" is a true throwback to one of my favorite film sub-genres, the seventies conspiracy film, in all the ways a silly cartoon like "Conspiracy Theory" could not be. Richard Donner directed that juvenile exercise, and, along with the main actors, you know it's just a pretender.
"The Game," however, is slow and deliberate, and Fincher lays a network of plotting that Donner couldn't handle on his best day. The film could easily be criticized for being an expertly crafted thrill-ride, too air-tight to live, but I disagree - as far as I'm concerned, the picture has more life in it than anything that came out in 1997.
Fincher knows this film's roots. "The Game" climbs the ladder of mounting paranoia with classic, unstoppable footsteps. It is quiet, like "All the President's Men" (and shot in a lot of parking garages, like that film). It even features a psych test similar to the one that Warren Beatty takes in "The Parallax View." The ever-mounting dread resembles that found in "The Conversation" (along with a distinctive toilet homage to that film).
The only thing different from those great films of the '70s (ones both mentioned and not), is how it all ends. Missing is the cynical, nihilistic ending, which was the best part of Fincher's "Seven" and many of this film's inspirations (stuff like "The French Connection," "Winter Kills," etc.). Fortunately, for buffs of this type of thing, the story has dived about as far into the depths as it could go before things suddenly lift (but not in a contrived way - as a matter of fact, things here are SO contrived, they transcend all that makes the practice so dull!).
Michael Douglas has his best performance (and role) in a long time, and Fincher has proven himself with his third feature, taking a wonderfully inspired screenplay and rising to its level. The best of its kind since "JFK," and my second favorite film of 1997.