The Game (1997)

David Fincher’s red-herring thriller “The Game” failed with most mainstream critics. I loved it. I just saw a different movie. “Game” is a deceitful movie about the deceit of movie-making, the Hollywood button-pushing that we know is fiction, but that we get sucked up into: Drama, action, comedy. The edits, camera angles, lights, sound effects: We know it’s fake, but we buy in bulk. We get involved. The plot: Michael Douglas is soul-dead San Fran multimillionaire Nicholas Van Orton who accepts a “gift” from his baby brother (Sean Penn), a vacation that comes to him at home and office, a personalized attack that crushes and removes every instinct Nic has built, bought, and forged, starting with a TV with its own mind and running past a crashed cab in deep water. The plot is preposterous, of course, but it’s on purposefully so, this beautiful nasty meta-film of a film stars a man who has bought into his own Hollywood thriller by choice, we the audience running with him. By choice. Douglas -– the symbol of amoral America during the 1980s –– is perfectly cast as a vastly unlikable man who we root for quickly. We are him. A