The trials and tribulations of drowning in money.

Rating: 1/10 (30 September 2018)

"The Game" plays about as well in today's world as "Let them eat cake" did in Marie Antoinette's. I just can't bring myself to care about Michael Douglas's investment banker character who lacks nothing in the material world but apparently needs to have ungodly millions spent on him to open his eyes to life again. Poor guy. It also doesn't seem that Michael Douglas cares much about the character either, since there is nothing particularly engaging about his acting; on the other hand, to be fair, Michael Douglas pretty much never does anything except play Michael Douglas, so what can we really expect. Sean Penn is superb at being super annoying, but then we all know that's not really acting either. The premise is that friends or loved-ones pay a company to subject ultra high net worth clients to bizarrely complex, supremely dangerous, and highly improbable games in which they're pushed up to and beyond their physical and mental limits. It's supposed to be good for them. In reality, the various kinds of trauma this would produce would inevitably lead to huge lawsuits and significant jail time for the perpetrators. It didn't even look to be the slightest bit fun or spiritually enlightening as a movie, never mind in real life. I kept thinking that maybe this was all going to play out as some kind of supernatural horror story along the lines of "Angel Heart" (which was truly horrifying), but instead this plot was somehow supposed to be possible. You simply cannot suspend disbelief with this film. In reality, Michael Douglas would be dead 100 times over, so the fact that the story was somehow supposed to happen completely killed the whole experience for me. And finally coming back to the beginning of my review, this film was made in 1996. The world has changed a lot since then. The gap between the haves and have-nots is now a yawning chasm, and when you imagine the preposterous level of financing the company behind "The Game" would have required to "awaken" its super-spoiled clients, the whole theme of the movie doesn't play well today. It's like, "Oh, you poor dear, you really had to make do with $10,000 a bottle wine. How did you ever survive?" Especially after all of the twists were revealed at the bitter end, I was only left feeling that I couldn't have cared less if every character in the movie had died a violent, horrible death. All of these insufferables would have been "friended" by the guillotine not so long ago in history. Therefore, other than excellent production values, no other values of any kind in this movie. I really wish I hadn't fallen for the high rating on this movie, so I gave it one star rather than the two I'm more inclined towards in a futile effort to bring the rating down a little bit.