I thought "Crank" was silly enough to be fun, and for that I was willing to suspend my irritation at "Gamer"'s thefts from "Rollerball," "Running Man," "Strange Days," and other dystopian B movies with the rationalization that a film about simulated realities was obviously alluding to the other examples of the genre. But "Gamer" isn't even this self-aware. What starts as a meditation on Hegel's master/slave dialectic degenerates into Marcusian conspiracies of how capitalism is equivalent to pornography and from there into the even more primitive territory of the Puritan hatred of sin. It is as if the writers of the film felt that rolling the clock back through variants of American cultural critique all the way to the Colonial era was somehow the best way for their viewers to feel what it must be like for evil nanocells to take over their minds. It didn't work. "Gamer" is just dumb. Oh, and what happened to color? Does everything have to look like you're about to pass out?
