The Game: Critic Reviews

The Game is an intensely exciting puzzle-gimmick thriller, the kind of movie that lets you know from the start that it's slyly aware of its own absurdity (which is why it can then get away with it).

Douglas, who delivers a new shade of cruel elegance each time he plays another urbane monster, is the ideal star for this vigorously contrived thriller.

A crowd-pleasing pip most of the way.

It's like the most hideously overproduced episode of The Twilight Zone on record, complete with a last twist that pretty much reduces what came before to soap bubbles.

Douglas is the right actor for the role. He can play smart, he can play cold, and he can play angry. He is also subtle enough that he never arrives at an emotional plateau before the film does, and never overplays the process of his inner change.

This 1997 thriller is fairly entertaining nonsense if all you're looking for is 128 minutes of diversion. But if you'd like something more from David Fincher, the director of Seven, don't get your hopes up.

Regardless of how far one chooses to buy into The Game -- and the ending ambiguously suggests that it could go on and on -- there is no doubt as to Fincher's staggering expertise as a director and his almost clinical sense of precision.

Fincher is still working on the assumption that he has better things to do than entertain an audience. Which would be fine if he weren't drawn to such schlocky material.

As it's unspooling on screen, the film is hugely entertaining, but there are several significant plot holes that grow wider the more closely they're investigated.

[N]ifty filmic style and crackpot sensibility.

Well-written, expertly paced, and undeniably riveting, The Game is perhaps most impressive in the way it strips down the Nicholas Van Orton character. The whole process is very layered and each layer breaks down Nicholas even more than the last.

This is one of those movies that's so tightly written and densely plotted, it leaves no room for error -- or viewer queries. Unfortunately, the questions will start flying even before the picture's over.

Good looking, tightly controlled thriller. An exhilarating ride that prepares the ground for Fight Club.

Sure, it strains credulity, but it's clever, well-paced and builds to a spectacular -- if not altogether satisfying -- conclusion.

"The Game" is a thrilling end run of deception in which a master manipulator is masterfully manipulated.

The film's 'message' about complacency transformed by chaos and uncertainty is hackneyed...

A solid original screenplay -- one of the best out of Hollywood this year.

The Game is one of those films that requires the viewer to suspend his disbelief to a great extent, but offers pretty good entertainment in return for that effort.

The Game is something more than a stylish thriller, though it dishes up style and thrills in abundance.

You know how some films could be great or have indeed some great moments, but for some reason, are disappointing? This piece is exactly in that category.