In the near future Ken Castle [Michael C. Hall] has invented a technology that allows for someone to control a human being remotely.  Ken Castle then decided to make himself the richest man alive by applying this technology in video games and created the game Slayers.  Slayers is a game where all the players are death row inmates and are sent into a field to do battle in Counter Strike style fun.  If any inmate survives 30 rounds of the game he/she is given a full pardon and freed into the world.  Kable [Gerard Butler] has only three more rounds to survive before being given his pardon.

Here comes another film from the writer/directors of Crank and Crank High Voltage, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor.  They decide this time to enter the realm of video games and even though they probably never intended for this film to make any form of social commentary some can definitely see an overall issue explored in the film with poorly written commentary on the internet/gaming community.  Now I know it maybe stupid of me to try and read into a film that involves the same individuals who gave me a movie where Jason Statham has sex in public with his girlfriend in order to literally save his life, but if something is there I’m going to talk about it.

Now the obvious moral questions are raised about the game Slayers where these soldiers are being controlled by all the 15 year old nerds out there and they are being killed more for amusement rather than punishment.  However, there is also another game in the movie called Society which uses the same technology and is a Sims like game with real people as avatars and the players seem to have no restriction as to what they can do with their avatars.  They make them perform sexual acts as well as many other completely degrading activities while in this real world that would make anyone feel sick.  Also the part that would bother most people, which I don’t even know why they forced to show this, is that Angie [Amber Valletta] is controlled by this unnamed massively overweight guy and we are continually cutting between watching Angie bend over to show off her ass and asking for sex from random men and watching this guy shove his fat sausage fingers into a bowl of cheetos and seeing him say the words that Angie then repeats.  It talks about the internet’s somewhat disgusting idea that you have no clue who is hiding behind that screenname or avatar, and you could be chatting up some hot 25 year old lady who turns out to be an 80 year old priest.

The film did little right and the movie did a lot wrong.  This movie touts itself as an action film but due to a lot of stylistic choices by the directors during all the battle sequences there is this constant use of some crazy glitching effect in the video as if they are showing us a lag in the video of the battle reaching the player at his computer.  However, what Neveldine and Taylor refuse to recognise is that if the action is unfollowable – yes I created a new word – then the scene is rendered pointless and just serves as padding for the runtime of the movie that you are already watching and wondering why you wasted your money on it.  They also had a lot of moments where the camera would spin in circles around characters and makes you feel like you’re on a rollercoaster rather than seeing a bunch of soldiers head out onto the battlefield and just takes away from the experience of the film.

If I had to say something positive about this movie there were only two parts of this movie that I found somewhat enjoyable.  Michael C. Hall was pretty fun in his role here, even though the way the final fight between Butler and Hall ended was pretty laugh out loud stupid.  The accent he uses is pretty bad, but in a good way and I bought him as a silly villain who is going for world domination and all of that good stuff.  The only other thing I liked about this movie is that there were two scenes in the movie which involved characters singing, or pretending to sing, and I found them pretty fun to watch.

In the end this movie is pretty bad and nowhere near worth the entry fee.  The ridiculous story, that isn’t properly throughout makes this movie a waste of your time and the action isn’t even good enough to be fun like G.I. Joe was last month.  Take my advice and skip this flick completely.

IMDB says 7.4/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 22%

I say 2.5/10