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FILM REVIEWS

Twisted Mind Games Make 'The Game' a Winner
By Bob Fenster
The Arizona Republic
Sept. 12, 1997

Movies are, by their nature, games of psychological manipulation, in which nothing is what it appears to be.

The Game is a work of psychological manipulation in which nothing is as it appears to be to Michael Douglas.

Douglas stars as Nicholas Van Orton, a wealthy investment banker with the cold heart of, well, an investment banker.

Nicholas' younger, wilder brother (Sean Penn) gives him an odd birthday present: a gift certificate from a strange company that designs games specifically for wealthy people, games in which the object of the game may be to discover what the object of the game is. The game is supposed to be a profoundly transformative life experience. Or is it? Nicholas can't tell because no one will tell him exactly what is going on.

Soon enough, odd occurrences let chaos into his neat little life of order and power: pens that leak, elevators that don't work, people who appear and then disappear. This introduces a certain excitement into Nicholas' predictable life because he can no longer feel confident about what will happen next. Nor can he be sure if anything is real or if it's all part of the game.

But what begins as pranks escalates into ominous mysteries that may have nothing to do with games. The Game is as slick as it is twisted, which is why it's fun. If you buy into the premise, you will enjoy playing along with Nicholasas he tries to unravel the game before his mind unravels. If you resist the movie's concept by focusing on the preposterous nature of some of the things that happen to Nicholas, you'll also miss out on much of the fun.

The Game is one of those movies in which you think they'll never be able to pull all the loose ends together, that it will all turn out tobe nothing but a series of cheap tricks.

Therefore, you'll want to be the first person in your water-cooler clique to see The Game because almost anything that people give away about this movie will weaken its impact.

The lead role is tailored for Douglas. He plays rich and despicable so well, yet gets us to hope both for his transformation and his survival. Douglas shows us that even when the rich are profoundly disturbed, they are profoundly disturbed differently from you or I.

Penn, who took a star turn in She's So Lovely, takes a back seat in The Game, appearing infrequently to lend a tempered psycho quality to the proceedings. Director David Fincher proves that the psychological eeriness he created in Seven was no fluke.

Fincher weaves a wicked web. Enough said.

The Game is rated R for profanity and violence.


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