There were times at which I thought this movie had a lock on its tone: the quick cuts to an adorably fat dog, a peppy park ranger with the voice of an angel, the diagetic manatee documentary. I imagined at one point early on while Beth is giving her Columbine-wannabe brother a lap dance that I might reference to Cruel Intentions (1999) while trying to describe this movie.
I vacillated between disappointment that such good 8-bit graphics animators had been employed to make cut scenes that would later be used as a vision board by a murderer and sadness at the fact that any of the links that I could cite as similarities between this movie and mass shootings in schools or Japanese care homes would likely attract a group of readers conducting searches for unfathomably evil reasons. I haven’t had to worry about that since TFW NO GF while writing reviews and at least in that situation it was a documentary, not an entirely unforced error.
As its name suggests, Game of Death is not big on subtlety. It’s about as coy as the first few scenes of masturbation and sex indicate, and partially, I think it’s probably part of the marketing campaign for me to hate watch it and then ask “Why the incest plot?” So, on the one hand, I feel like I shouldn’t rise to the bait, and on the other, I have some confidence that you’ll be able to look past the bait to see how deeply boring the plot of this movie is. It is Jumanji without the animals. The backstory. The drums. The riddles. It doesn’t really qualify for a board game movie at all, if we’re going to get into it. I remember the medieval historian Andrew Cunningham saying once that the word “science” as we understand it today is far too often attributed to places and peoples who did not practice it. Science, Cunningham says, is like a game in that you have to know you’re playing it.
The tagline of this movie “kill or be killed” and one of the player’s monologues toward the end try to intellectualize the blindspot of making a killer board game movie but forgetting to make the board game by implying that it’s like Fight Club, in that there is this one important rule, but 1) Fight Club had more than one rule, and 2) Fight Club isn’t a fucking board game. Game of Death‘s Game of Death doesn’t have turns. It has no rules, so it has no loopholes to those rules. It has no technicalities, so everything is and isn’t a technicality. No one bothers to test the rules in creative ways or otherwise. Even the design of the game interface is impossibly opaque.
There’s what appears at first to be a time clock counting down from the impossibly high number of 24. Imagine for a second if the Seven Samurai had been the 24 Samurai or if the Hateful Eight had been the Hateful 24 or if the show 24 had been 162. A lot less appealing, right? But, no, this number doesn’t change until people die, even though it clearly has animation that is tracking time. This is so distracting, it makes me a little grateful that Roman Mars and his team at 99% Invisible have already done a whole episode on the struggle to design a satisfying interface for describing the passage of time on computers.
The head explosion bit seems cribbed from a few movies that have been around too recently for it to feel coincidental–even one that explicitly borrows from the board game genre and flirts with the supernatural. If we’re trying to run some apologetics, I wonder if the reason why we have such a high number on the board is to avoid similarities between this movie and a number of other franchises with similar plots like Final Destination or Happy Death Day? But if not everyone of that 24 is meaningful (almost nothing is, strictly, “meaningful” in this movie, which it might claim is the point, but it’s not), then how different is it, really?
I’m not saying that starring–and I use that term loosely here–in this movie should disqualify you from ever acting in a movie again because of how poorly it reflects on one’s judgement–obviously that woman with the fat dog was delightful and I would like her to get more work–but I’m saying we should take past performances into consideration.
The only way that this movie is going to become a cult classic is if some school shooters decide to form a cult. I haven’t wanted a movie unmade so badly since Mother! but on a positive note, it did not try to outstay it’s welcome.
