Gamer (2009)

Gamer arrives from 2009, a year when a dystopian thriller could still be sold on the promise of Gerard Butler shouting and Michael C. Hall mincing through a villain role with evident delight. The premise concerns Ken Castle, the richest man alive, who has monetized human bodies through self-replicating nanites. Death-row prisoners run and die in Slayers for the amusement of strangers, while volunteers perform their lives away in Society. It is a grim little machine, and the film never lets us forget that the audience is complicit, a bold position for a Lionsgate release.

The cast is diverse by the standards of its moment, with Terry Crews, Ludacris, Zoë Bell, and John Leguizamo filling out the margins, though the screenplay never asks that diversity to mean anything. Ludacris leads a resistance called the Humanz, and the film gestures at prison-for-profit and the obscenity of a billionaire harvesting the poor for sport. These gestures stay gestures. Castle is a cartoon, and his villainy is the villainy of a plot device, not an argument. There is no ecological dimension to the decay, no inquiry into gender beyond the assignment of functions to the women, and no interest in the interior lives of anyone who is not Gerard Butler.

The film's uneasy relationship with its own material lingers. It wants to indict the commercialization of violence while being commercialized violence, a contradiction critics noted at the time and which the film never resolves. The satire arrives through spectacle, not sermon, which spares us the lecture but also spares us the point. It is loud, mean, and occasionally clever, a C-grade exercise in self-loathing that mistook volume for insight. We classify it, we file it, and we move on to the next specimen.