Hey, guys. It’s been a bit, and I’m sure a lot of you have been wondering where I’ve been these past few weekends.
Well, I’ve been traipsing around Siena for the past twenty days or so, getting stuff done with music and all that jazz. I never had time, and I sure as hell didn’t have a movie theater nearby, but what’s a guy gonna do, right? Nevertheless, it was a fun time over there, and crazy times were had for all.
So to go with the fact that I was out of the country, I figured I’d review a movie from another culture that I watched on my flight back to Boston from Florence via Frankfurt. So let’s get with today’s movie…
(Please note that today’s movie as I saw it was edited by the airline I watched it on, so it may have affected how I experienced it.)
Game
On the private island of Samos, a rich man invites four people to his private island, saying he has evidence against three men and claiming that the fourth is his daughter. When he winds up murdered the next morning, however, it becomes a game to figure out who killed the man in question.
And stuff gets crazy from there.
Okay, so straight off, this to me looks like a Bollywood movie. The opening credits flashed a certificate from the area, and all the songs that were featured in the movie were sung in Hindi. Thus… it kind of has some of the more ridiculous trappings that people are likely to associate with Bollywood from what we’ve seen on the internet.
For one thing, the plot is a glorified mess. The set-up for the first act of the movie falls very squarely into the term “idiot premise”, and any suspension of disbelief is pretty much offed by the fact that you’re asking yourself a lot of questions about the set-up pretty much as soon as you get out of the starting gate. And it gets incredibly stupid after a long time.
For another, the acting is incredibly stilted, and extremely inconsistent. Some of the actors are good. But those that aren’t good tend to be distracting from the better parts of this film’s acting. And some of the actors again fall into that trap of not really having anything interesting to do, and just giving the same two facial expressions as a result.
The third is that the direction is really not that good. The movie continuously switches between English and Hindi throughout the dialogue, and most of the time, the language changes mid-sentence, which really jars with our sense of immersion into the movie.
But for some reason… despite the fact that this wasn’t a very well-made movie, I actually rather enjoyed it for some reason. I’m not sure why, but the ridiculous nature of the whole enterprise made it enjoyable to watch. And the good stuff was actually very good. For one thing, the protagonist was one of the more engaging characters I’ve seen in the movies these days, and for another it was fun watching as the plot got increasingly ridiculous.
And in all honesty, Game actually turns out to be pretty good. Yeah, it’s a badly made film, but I enjoyed it for its badness, and for the stuff that it did really well. So all in all, I suggest you give it a shot.
3/4
It has a few flaws, but it’s still worth checking out.
