Gamer

YOU HAVE TO give Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor some credit. With their head-spinning Crankmovies, the team has developed a tartrazine-charged style all their own.

If their films have one thing in common with those of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick – just the one thing, mind – it is that two minutes of footage, selected randomly, can instantly be identified as the work of a particular (in this case, dual) sensibility. You don’t see candy- coloured, crystal-meth hookers gyrate like this anywhere else.

None of which is to suggest that Gameris anything other than rubbish. Borrowing bits of plot from Tron, Death Race 2000and a barrel of pigswill, the boys have set out to offer a grand Orwellian treatise on the dangers of virtual reality. The plot, insofar as I can understand it, revolves around two games – one a sexier version of Second Life, the other a gory shoot-em-up – that feature real, fleshy human beings controlled by the usual clichéd basement- dwellers with pizza breath.

The most adept avatar in Slayersis a convicted murderer with the gruff voice and inert body language of Gerard Butler. He is several levels away from winning his freedom, but he longs to escape the remote control of his player, a spoilt teenager, and make his way into Society, the less violent, more lubricious game, where his distressed wife (Amber Valletta) is currently being forced to act out the sexual fantasies of an obese shut-in. (Still with me?)

As expected, Neveldine/Taylor offer the odd, outrageously impressive visual flourish. The nightclub in which dollybirds occupy a giant Newton’s cradle is a sight to behold, and any action film that incorporates an old-school song-and-dance number into its denouement deserves a degree of respect.

But, whereas the lads' throw- everything-at-the-screen style worked for a one-note, high- concept flick such as Crank, it proves ill-suited to elucidating the labyrinthine (not to say half-baked) plot of the current over-ambitious melange. Rarely has one longed so fervently for the words "game over".