Quickie Review: The Game

Rating: 8/10 (21 January 2016)

It's been some years since I've seen The Game. I remember enjoying it very much so. Despite being a step down from his previous film, David Fincher's second outing in urban thriller-mode feels like something of a taut modern classic. A neo-Hitchcock movie if I ever saw one.
The film follows a dull and greedy investment banker who is given a card as a birthday present by his brother, who tells him to phone up the company whose expertise lies in some form of enigmatic character building game. Despite phoning up and attending an arranged test he is told he did not qualify. However, after this our protagonist finds some truly odd thing occurring in his life. Are these events real, or are they a part of 'the game'? What follows is an engrossing roller coaster ride with enough twists and turns to keep you at the edge of your seat during the course of its runtime. You never really know what's coming next.
Douglas and Penn as brothers are on form in a film I'd recommend to anyone. It's a fun movie for a Saturday evening, but not one that assumes its audience are idiots. Quite the opposite, in fact. If I had any complaints about the film it would be the ending which, for a movie that was pretty believable for the most part, required a lot of suspension of disbelief
Best Scene: Like I said it's been sometime since I've seen it. One part still remains in my mind, however – Douglas is visited by a frantic Penn begging him to forget everything about the game. It's a real um, game-changer in the film because it was the scene that cemented the realisation that "Oh, hang on. Things are serious here." (Or so I thought.)