The game is up.

Rating: 6/10 (1 February 2016)

Much of The Game is presented as your stock standard thriller, with all the Fincher touches. Flashbacks flicker in our main character Nicholas Van Orton's mind, using old video footage to establish the tragedy that still lingers many years later. The vast, dim halls of his mansion are lonely, something that its elegance and luxury cannot hide. When he leaves the comfort of his wealth, he is bombarded with rubbish dumps and dirty back alleys, and sirens and street lights, overexposed, blast at his eyes. When he enters the hotel room that seeks to incriminate him, there is that cold blue tint, nearly as menacing as its contents, and Fincher uses a favoured technique; a flurry of inserts of sexually compromising photographs, lines of cocaine, and bloody tissues that just won't be flushed away.
The mystery of CBS, the corporation hired to change Nicholas' life, draws us naturally in like it does for him. Like any mystery, no one is determined to give him a straight answer. His brother Conrad remarks that it changed his life, as do several gentlemen at a club who have also been through the program. Their pleasantries hide a hint of menace and threat underneath and the possibilities stack up in Nicholas' mind: what possibly could be so mind blowing and life changing that could not be revealed in anything but cryptic dialogue? There is a particularly clever scene where it appears that they have infiltrated his TV and home, and the newscaster talks to him directly through the screen. It shows a voyeuristic angle of Nicholas in his room, and this is immediately frightening - more so once he discovers that he himself has brought the surveillance into his own home. The paranoia is ramped up significantly in the ease of which the actor disguises himself from the housemaid.
Unfortunately, the movie cannot quite maintain this level of tension. What is initially complex and intriguing takes a route into a more confusing and muddled path that doesn't entirely add up. The script is dictated by those moments of shock that seek to disarm Nicholas and render him at his most vulnerable, and then again and again. It moves from plot development to plot development at a frenzied pace, never letting him completely breathe or react. It spends the majority of the film dismantling his entire private and public life, and is so obsessed with throwing plot twist after twist at Nicholas that there is little time devoted to the actual moral of the tale, to change his outlook on life and create a new person. We are simply supposed to accept that this series of traumatic and debilitating events will suddenly bring about a change in his miserable life - the resolution of It's a Wonderful Life tacked on to a mystery thriller.
The actors are a mixed bag. Douglas does well with what he is given to work with, and is almost believable as the broken man who has had everything stripped away from him. He is given no moment of eventual emotional catharsis and has to quickly switch from that destroyed identity to the birthday boy. There is little actual chemistry between the chosen female character who leads him towards the centre of the conspiracy, but the script is audacious enough to suggest an eventual romance anyway. And Penn, who flits in and out of the story as required, he feels less like a brother than someone who is playing a very cruel prank. After all, if a man is willingly driven to suicide, it takes more than a plot twist to rejuvenate his life. This is an okay thriller with barely any common sense, a weak back-story and little emotional backing. The second time around, there's not much to admire. And who the hell are all the people who bothered to turn up at his party? Isn't he supposed to be a miserable, uptight loner?