Yep, there really is a musical dance bit in Gamer. But that dude does have a head, fortunately.

I was a bit reluctant to go see Gamer the other week. It looked a bit crap y’see. Had I known in advance that it was “from the makers of Crank”, that alone would’ve probably swayed me in the direction of giving it a miss entirely. But eh well.

Anyway in Gamer, we’re plunged into “years from now” future and computer games called “Society” and “Slayers” are all the rage. Society is a real life version of The Sims, only players pay to control other (real) people and they in turn, get paid for being controlled.  ”Slayers” on the other hand is a rather more deadly game, involving death row prisoners who, in a bid to win their freedom, allow themselves to be controlled as the avatar in a ‘shoot em up’ type game. All of this is made possible by a special nano-technology cellular head implant that effectively gives each human in the game their own IP address and hands over full control of their vision and actions to the players.

Now I know what you’re thinking: That sounds shit.

And you’d be quite right. It was.

When you can barely make out what’s happening with the shaky-cam action sequences from the very beginning, it’s not the sign of a good action film. When you’ve also got a poor script, dodgy acting and a crap plot, it’s downhill all the way. Then there’s the smaller, annoying things, like when the good guy is then surrounded by 20 bad guys, why do they all wait nicely to take him on mano-a-mano? I dunno. Even the gratuitous tits weren’t that nice – that’s just unforgivable if you can’t even get that right!

And as for the out of place musical dance number… well… that was just bizarre.

3/10.