# Game, The (1997)

### reviewed by
Serdar Yegulalp

    The Game (1998)
    * * *
    A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
    Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp

CAPSULE: Freaky and fiendish thriller that follows its internal logic almost through to the end.

THE GAME is David Fincher's new movie after SE7EN, and like that movie, it revels in the horrid feeling we have that things are scuttling around out of sight and rearranging the chess pieces on us.

Michael Douglas plays a wealthy loner named Nicholas Van Orten, who spends all day playing with other people's money and most of his night screening his phone calls and watching CNN. His ex-wife still tries, futilely, to get back in touch with him, and he's estranged from his brother -- who drops back into his life one day and tells him about a weird, clandestine company called CRS. For a fee, CRS will make your life "more interesting." Van Orton, tempted, eventually caves in and signs up for whatever it is they have to offer. They have a lot.

At first CRS seems to be something like one of those elaborate prank-pulling firms, mixed with a live-action role-playing game. Little things go wrong in Van Orton's life -- his briefcase gets stuck, his pen explodes, etc. -- but they add up and go from being nuisances to outright maddening. Soon he's running down an alley with attack dogs tearing his shoes off. Soon after that he's being followed, stolen from, shot at, drowned, blown up, and stranded south of the border, and I think I've missed more than a few things. Through all of this, Van Orton tries to maintain his sanity and enlist whoever he can to find out what's really going on.

The whole purpose of the game, of course, is self-encapsulating: Van Orton is driven to find out who's screwing with him, and is then inspired to do leaps of amateur detective work (and pure sweat). What starts as an irritant becomes a way for him to re-evaluate how he deals with his life -- something like full-contact est, although I doubt est was ever conducted from the barrel of a submachine gun. It's a neat idea, but it's not quite played out to its fullest here; the way the broken connections in his life are handled are sewn up on the level of a bad TV docudrama, while the movie's real plot, as frightening and convincing as it is, takes place in a completely different world.

The movie's technical and thespian credits are top-notch. Fincher makes the movie's backdrops and environments into genuinely threatening and harsh places to be, not just movie sets; he immerses us the way SE7EN ate at the senses as well. Douglas does a fine job of portraying a man whose nerves are being frayed, then re-braided by hand. And Sean Penn does a nice turn as Van Orton's brother. (Look fast for Fincher regular Mark Boone Jr. as a greasy private eye, too.)

All of this doesn't change the fact that I felt a little put off by the movie's conclusion. Without ruining anything, I'll say this: given the level of psychic sadism shown in the movie, it's more than a little astonishing that we get the ending we do. Maybe I was expecting the wrong thing, but this is one of those movies where a Grand Guignol ending would have been a perfect cap to the movie's deranged mission. Instead, we get a closed-ended logic that while symmetrical, isn't nearly as satisfying as the tastes of anarchy that we got throughout. But the ride is freaky and entertaining, and unquestionably a shade different from the run of the mill.

POSTSCRIPT: ROT13 SPOILER DISCUSSION. DECODE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Urer vf zl pbzcynvag, fcryyrq bhg n yvggyr zber rkcyvpvgyl. Ina Begba vf yrq gb oryvrir gung gur tnzr vf n tvnag fpnz qrfvtarq gb frcnengr uvz sebz uvf zbarl. Jung V rkcrpgrq onfrq ba gung frghc jnf guvf pbapyhfvba:

Nsgre Ina Begba fvtaf gur "ovyy" sebz PEF naq unaqf vg onpx gb uvf oebgure, uvf oebgure gheaf, jnyxf bss, naq tevaf rabezbhfyl. Gur jubyr guvat JNF n fpnz -- gur purpx sbe gur fvtarq "ovyy" jvyy tb qverpgyl vagb uvf cbpxrg, naq gura ur naq PEF jvyy vaqrrq inavfu sbe tbbq. V zragvbarq guvf gb frireny crbcyr, jub ehrshyyl fnj jung V zrnag. Ohg abguvat bs gur xvaq gnxrf cynpr, bs pbhefr.

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