The Game

Rated - Stone Cold

When I enter a cinema I make a contract: to suspend disbelief for the whole film. And I will not walk out on a film, no matter what.

With The Game, I wanted to breach that contract. I didn't walk out, but I do want my money back.

When you guess the ending, and the whole premise of a film, within a few moments of the film beginning, it is not always the end of the world. Often you can sit back and enjoy other aspects of the film - the direction, the characters, the acting, the editing, the art direction and so on. But in The Game, it wasn't enough. Even the setting of San Francisco, which I knew well enough to recognise landmarks, didn't compensate for what I considered to be an absolutely stupid premise for a film.

Instead, bored, I took to picking holes in the plot and debunking the film's logic. This, of course, made me even more contemptuous of the film. And though I must admit that the ending did give me a moment's pause while I thought, for a moment, that I might have been wrong - I wasn't.