'Gamer' Review: Hollywood, Step Away From the Shaky-Cam

You’re not using the Almighty’s name in vain when you mean it. So everybody all together now: God Damn the Shaky-Cam.

Was it Spielberg with “Saving Private Ryan” who started the shaky-cam phenomenon or was it “NYPD Blue?” Whatever. My suggestion is that we build a time machine to locate and eradicate the host virus. Not through violence, through a plea to their humanity (unless it’s Paul Greengrass — we’ll ring his doorbell and run) and DVD examples of what their monster will become. Then we’ll go back to 1941 where you can drop me off in front of Barbara Stanwyck’s house.

Maybe, possibly, inside the jittery mess that is “Gamer,” there sits an ’80’s style actioner — an unpretentious time killer with an interesting premise, lots of action and a little gratuitous nudity to get you through a slimmer than slim story. There’s just no way to tell because you can’t see anything, and the epileptic camera is only part of the problem. The cinematography’s completely washed out and every time you get any kind of fix on what’s happening a wavy, electronic-transmission effect is added for no reason other than to add it.

The “Running Man” meets “Avatar” story is built on the idea of a nano-cell, a synthetic cell let loose in the human body that replicates until it dominates. When the program’s complete the host can then come under the full control of a gamer, who, for a fee and from the comfort of mother’s basement, can do whatever he wishes with his electronic counterpart. The result is a sub-culture of desperate individuals willing to come under this control in order to make a living — and because you have to be pretty twisted to find control over another human being entertaining, think “Sim City” at midnight on Sunset Boulevard.

The nano-cell has also made “Slayers” possible, a pay-per-view reality show where death row inmates serve as avatars in a series of urban shoot-em-ups sanctioned by a federal government desperate for revenue. The show is a national phenomenon thanks in large part to Kable (Gerard Butler), who’s on death row for murder, desperate to get back to his family, and just a few games away from becoming the first prisoner to win full pardon with thirty wins.

The nano-cell was created by Ken Castle (Michael C. Hall), a celebrity billionaire and fidgety sadist with SPECTRE-like plans for world domination. With the help of “Humanz,” an underground group on to Castle’s arch-villainy, Kable escapes a game he wasn’t supposed to survive and targets Castle for revenge.

With another draft or two of the script (and a tripod), what is arguably a pretty imaginative premise could’ve risen to something. Instead it’s a waste of Butler, one of the few not-a-metrosexuals working today, and The Great Keith David, who does the same thing here he did in “Crash”: makes his single scene the most memorable one.

But back to that shaky-cam. “Gamer,” and all those filmed like it, do not represent a “style.” Confusion does not equal style. This is cover for filmmakers not only lacking in style but too lazy to choreograph compelling action sequences – which is probably the most difficult job a director can come up against. You not only have to stage the actors and props, you also have to figure out where to place the camera.

But not anymore… Just set the camera to “seizure” and the edit machine to “nonsensical.”

If our government really wanted to earn pay-per-view revenue they might consider a cage match to the death between two of the worst styles to hit the movies in their 100-plus year history: The Shaky-Cam vs. Quirky.

That I’d pay to see.