Gamer: Critic Reviews

As the brutish Kable, Gerard Butler must find out who's pulling his strings, but it's the audience whose chain gets yanked by this headache-inducing techno-violent mishmash.

In the press materials Mr. Butler informs us enthusiastically that the movie "has all the hallmarks of Neveldine's and Taylor's sick, yet genius minds." At least he's half right.

The game sequences are all familiar flash, and zero tension.

There's plenty of violence, but the movie's already-passe fear of a Web-based world is standard-issue.

Directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor were responsible for the delirious Crank and Crank 2 but left the magic behind.

Literally playing an action figure, bulky Butler doesn't deliver a performance so much as a workout routine; the best that can be said for him here is that he shows endurance.

This was never going to be much, but it could have been more than this.

Bodies and buildings blow up but this is carnage of the most lacklustre sort, with any momentum petering out long before it's "game over."

Add an element of interactivity into the hyperkinetic, repetitive action, plodding narrative, and stupefyingly obvious social commentary, and the potential might exist for something entertaining.

Crass, nonstop action triumphs over narrative and character in this movie-length simulation of a video game.

It's a deeply cynical and joyless point of view, completely lacking in the winking visual style that made Crank worth a look.

Wait for this one on Cable... jeez I'm saying that a lot. What is really going on in 2009?

Neveldine and Taylor simply spray their venom across the screen with little vision, once again making a friendly trip to the multiplex feel like undeserved torture.

What to make of short-attention-span artists satirizing a short-attention-span world? [Blu-ray]

Incoherent and interminable...

At times striking, and at others silly, and and yet at others sickening, but never too stupid, at least not compared to so much else flash and pop peddled to the masses these days.

a big, loud mess that loses its few good ideas in a morass of convoluted storytelling that it has, sadly, confused with stylish innovation

A streak of genius runs through this dystopian vision of a world in where VR games are played with real people ... it touches some exposed nerves before retreating into cliches.

Gamer feels like a video cheapie that just time warped in from the 1990s . . .

Like the 'Crank' films, this is an absurdly exaggerated, outlandishly crass and alternately inventive and appalling depiction of a man violently fighting to liberate himself from the forces that seek to control him...

The film is a cacophonous mess without a single interesting character.

Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor deserve some credit for being upfront about their desire to deliver purely adrenaline-driven action cinema and for making it look brilliant.