The Game (1997)
Directed by David Fincher
In honor of his birthday, San Francisco banker Nicholas Van Orton, a financial genius and a cold-hearted loner, receives an unusual present from his younger brother, Conrad: a gift certificate to play a unique kind of game. In nary a nanosecond, Nicholas finds himself consumed by a dangerous set of ever-changing rules, unable to distinguish where the charade ends and reality begins.
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23 films that influenced The Game
What critics say influenced The Game
Although Seconds heavily informed later, paranoia-as-puzzle, 1990’s thrillers from David Fincher’s The Game to John Woo’s Face/Off, it doesn’t get hung up on the mechanics of Arthur’s regeneration.
The movie seems to take some cues from John Frankenheimer's sinister Seconds, but without that film's chilly sensibility.
By keeping the audience in the dark along with its protagonist, The Game harkens back to the classic paranoia thrillers from the 1960s and '70s; most specifically, John Frankenheimer's 1966 Seconds, another movie in which a constipated businessman gets involved with an outfit that forever alters his life.
"The Game" bears some resemblance to John Frankenheimer's 1966 "Seconds," another pretentious and unpleasant picture, which starred Rock Hudson as a bored businessman who buys a new identity from a mysterious corporation.
"Seconds," featuring another sinister secret organization that gives people who are tired of their lives new faces, new bodies, new identities and, if you are John Randolph turning into Rock Hudson, a new sex life and a house on the Malibu beach.
At one point or another, The Game reminded me of three past movies: the Laurence Olivier/Michael Caine classic, Sleuth; Martin Scorsese's wildly offbeat After Hours; and the improbable-but-fun Malice.
Those who enjoyed the convolutions in David Fincher's The Game will find that Sleuth offers many of the same pleasures without the most obvious drawback (blatant manipulation of the audience).
Another asset is its literate and sophisticated dialogue (by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, who also wrote "The Net" ) reminiscent of Stanley Donen's "Charade" (written by the estimable Peter Stone).
And as Douglas races from humiliation to humiliation, Fincher includes visual references to such paranoia fests as "The Parallax View" and "The Conversation."
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The general mood is closer kin to Martin Scorsese's one-night-in-New-York farce After Hours, with more sinister overtones but with the same general trajectory.
All three of those films had the same sense of unpredictability evident in The Game (although, to be fair, Sleuth and After Hours were superior; Malice wasn't quite as tightly-scripted).
The rocky blur between reality and fantasy aspires to be a Hitchcockian After Hours, but at two hours plus, The Game gets played out early on.
A wild mix of "After Hours," "The Most Dangerous Game" and "A Christmas Carol," "The Game" imaginatively places a self-absorbed businessman into the middle of a deadly, real-life game of cat-and-mouse and then watches him fight for his survival, both emotionally and physically.
What emerges is a very poor man's North by Northwest without much moral nuance and a decreasing number of thrills.
He arouses sympathy for the thoroughly unlikable Nicholas, turning him into one of the hapless protagonists of "North by Northwest," "The Wrong Man" or "Saboteur."
And as Douglas races from humiliation to humiliation, Fincher includes visual references to such paranoia fests as "The Parallax View" and "The Conversation."
He arouses sympathy for the thoroughly unlikable Nicholas, turning him into one of the hapless protagonists of "North by Northwest," "The Wrong Man" or "Saboteur."
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He arouses sympathy for the thoroughly unlikable Nicholas, turning him into one of the hapless protagonists of "North by Northwest," "The Wrong Man" or "Saboteur."
"Vertigo" plot theft, as a friend suggested, with Unger as Kim Novak, posing throughout the movie as one sort of woman and then another.