I admit to being an avid gamer, but if the future of the videogame industry pans out even remotely like it is depicted in Gamer, consider me a full-time book reader. Here is another film that looks into the future and sees a depraved society in shambles, relying on schlocky, mindless entertainment to fulfill its need for excitement. So what does it do? It provides us with schlocky, mindless entertainment, apparently believing that its viewers are essentially no different from those in the society it foresees. After the film has done its deed and trudged through its underdeveloped plots and camera-wavering action sequences, there’s nothing at all for the audience to consider or even wonder about. Instead, they just collectively blink.

Gamer is set “some years from this exact moment” in a world that is both financially and morally bankrupt. One man, Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall of TV’s Dexter), has become a billionaire by creating a videogame called Slayers, in which gamers take control of a live human (a death-row inmate) and direct them through a series of thirty real-life deathmatch sessions pitting inmates against inmates in a fight for survival on huge battlegrounds. If the player is successful and the inmate survives all the sessions, the inmate gets his/her freedom. This sounds like a great deal for Kable (Gerard Butler, 300), an inmate who has made it through twenty-eight sessions unharmed under the control of a teenage gamer named Simon. Kable has become world-renowned for his success in Slayers, but he doesn’t care for the fame. He just wants the opportunity to see his wife and daughter again. Castle intends on ending Kable’s run with an inmate named Hackman, who is not controlled by a gamer and thus lacks the lag inherent in other participants. However, a group of underground hackers known as “Humanz” intend on bringing Castle and his gaming community down.

You would think that a movie with the simplicity of the above synopsis and a runtime just past ninety minutes wouldn’t bother attempting to develop subplots, but Neveldine and Taylor unwisely choose to include some anyway. One such sidetrack involves Society, the first game Castle created, which is like a real-life version of The Sims, except the in-game character is a real-life human controlled by a player (the former receiving payment, the latter doing the paying). Angie, Kable’s wife (played by Amber Valetta), is one such human, and too much of the movie is devoted to watching her weave in and out of this sex-obsessed game. Neveldine and Taylor have no way for this subplot to evolve into a meaningful commentary on online gaming (or even online chatrooms), so they just insert the wildest scenes possible, like one where a female avatar (controlled, of course, by a man) tackles another female standing on a street corner and then stands up and feverously licks the blood from a resultant wound on her own arm.

Much of the script undercuts its subplots further with a distinct lack of development (even for an action flick). For instance, there is no user in Society that is halfway normal and decent. Does everyone playing the game live out their fantasies in the most lewd fashion imaginable? I wanted to see at least one person carrying on a normal conversation. Then again, I suppose that would involve a second normal person, and that’s asking way too much of Gamer. And what are we to make of the subplot involving Castle’s ultimate objective to take over the world through mind control, when the Humanz can easily overtake his computer systems? Is the fact that Castle’s computer system has a weak firewall supposed to be a slight against Bill Gates (to whom Castle is at one point compared) and his often malfunctioning Windows operating system? If it is, it is a very subtle slight, one that does not fit in with the other more obvious slights the movie makes (like the beautiful, seductive Society woman who is controlled by an overweight male slob). The world of this film is one created purely to assist a struggling plot, not to serve as a believable setting.

One particularly underdeveloped storyline involves Gina Parker Smith, a Barbara Walters-like talk show host on a crusade against Castle’s games. Neveldine and Taylor’s script cannot find an interesting way to use her star status to assist with the dethroning of Castle, so she becomes a throwaway character in a throwaway subplot but is nonetheless prominently displayed. She primarily operates with the Humanz, who already seem to have everything under control (considering they are able to hack into Castle’s computer technology with apparently little effort) and thus realistically have no need for her. Had the movie dug a little deeper into the Smith character, there might have been another role for her to play, but the end result feels as though Neveldine and Taylor had the opportunity to work with Kira Sedgwick and thus wanted to put her into the movie even though she didn’t need to be. Unfortunately, her name and face alone are not enough to breathe life into this pointless character.

Of course there are even bigger questions to be asked of the primary plot involving Kable and his venture into the world of Slayers, the most prominent being: What are the rules of this game? It’s explained that the inmates that survive thirty rounds are given their freedom, but how exactly these rounds are played is still somewhat of a mystery. At several points Kable is shown walking alongside a fellow inmate, leading us to believe this may be a team game. However, in one battle all the inmates appear to be going after Kable and not one another, so it seems to be a one-against-the-world sort of contest instead. It’s confusing, and, unlike a videogame, there is no manual or tutorial to explain the rules, just the screenwriters and the directors, which in this case are the same two people, and neither seems eager to explain. There’s also a “save point” in the Slayers game, a centralized location that Kable appears to heading toward during the film’s many battles, but Neveldine and Taylor never make it clear what happens when that point is reached. How could a player ever return to this point, considering the action takes place in the real world? When he does reach it, does he miraculously become impervious to bullets? Do everyone’s guns automatically become unusable? It is as if Neveldine and Taylor are so focused on making everything seem like a game that they forgot that the rules need to make sense.

It doesn’t really matter, though, because the action scenes are riddled with such stylized, hyperkinetic cuts that even if we understood the game’s rules and objectives, we would still have no idea what was going on. Handheld camerawork brings the action in close, but then the camera pivots and turns and spins and jumps and loses all sight of what is going on. Instead of a simple shot of Kable running up to an abandoned car to take cover behind it, the camera looms overhead, behind, and in front of both the character and the car, cluttering the action with a variety of unnecessary cuts. Sometimes the camera will cut so quickly to and from a character’s death that it is impossible to tell who the character was, where he came from, or what he was doing. The battles themselves could have been fun to watch, but since there is no way to understand what is happening in them, they become meaningless successions of explosions, machineguns, and bloody body parts.

It has been a current trend for a while now that action films resemble video games (see G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, all of which have videogame tie-ins). Ironically, if Gamer had a videogame counterpart, it would be completely unplayable. Videogames are fluid and are focused on allowing gamers to get their bearings and become immersed in the world of the game. Gamer, on the other hand, is made up of a confounding array of cuts, a bevy of incongruous characters and plots, and a hailstorm of sex and violence with no bearing on either the real world or a futuristic one. It operates solely on its own nebulous principles, occasionally sharing the rules of the game with the audience but most often failing to. You don’t hear this very often, but go play a video game instead.