Rated for 'I' for Immature

“Gamer” might have once been a good idea, a film about the psychological implications of controlling another human being all for the purposes of entertainment. But my guess is it soon became manufactured as a mash-up of “The Sims” and “Death Race” to market toward the video game-playing, cult film-watching, ADD fanboy that would hope (or believe) the world is obsessed with gaming, violence and S&M.

Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall) has engineered a game in which real-life convicts compete on a battlefield as they are controlled and operated by people playing video games from the comfort of their own homes, and since the action is real and live, the whole world watches on Pay-Per-View. Kable (Gerard Butler) is one of the participants fighting for his life, and – if he survives 30 rounds of battle – his freedom. But Castle is set on turning Kable into a fallen hero and consequently getting enough fans eating out of his pocket to enslave the country.

The psychological and ethical discussion is there, ideally with the goal of making sense of this impossible scenario in any time, present or future. But what makes this film so unbearable to watch is its fascination with everything dirty, disgusting and extravagant.

In the action segments, the queasy handheld camera is always at work, but adding salt to the wound are the equally annoying edits of electronic distortion, the obnoxious wipe cuts to jump from frame to frame of violence and the goal of never keeping the camera in the same place.

The same goes for the scenes inside another video game called “Society,” where players control real people who interact with each another, usually inappropriately. The cuts, the lighting and the gratuitous nudity all add up to paint a picture of an immature world where all of this is admired, and the result is intolerable.

Exchanges of dialogue are just as poorly lit and excessively edited to give the perception of mood. Hall has an amusing scene and dance number and makes for a good villain, but he’s only in the film sparingly. The supporting cast is bizarre and uninspired, and Butler has fewer lines than a handful of them.

Gaming is certainly not this juvenile, but if the fanboys ever want to prove that their games and their films can be accepted as an art form, “Gamer” is certainly not helping their cause.