Gamer / YMMV - TV Tropes

Awesome Music: Both the trailer and the actual movie make great usage of Marilyn Manson's cover of "Sweet Dreams".
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: When Kable/Tillman finally confronts the Big Bad, Castle breaks into a choreographed dance number. Oddly enough, it's probably the best part of the movie just because Michael C. Hall makes it so damn entertaining.
Complete Monster:
- Ken Castle is a billionaire technology magnate in a dystopian future. He develops an indulge-every-depravity-you-want-short-of-murder game called Society using brainwashed, destitute people as the players' avatars. His second game, Slayers, is a death match where condemned prisoners kill each other in an enclosed warzone. If they're running low on participants, Castle will frame them if necessary. If a prisoner can survive 30 rounds they'll be released, but he has no intention of honoring this arrangement and plans to kill anyone who makes it that far. He ultimately wants to brainwash most of the planet to be his slaves and rob them of anything even resembling free will. He takes over John "Kable" Tillman's body to force him to slit his little girl's throat. Completely lacking empathy for anyone, he sees people entirely as toys to play with and destroy as he sees fit.
- Hackman is an enormous inmate in Kable's prison who went on a massive killing spree just so he could be locked up and personally participate in the carnage in Slayers. He arranges with Castle to remove the mind control on himself so he has an advantage over the other prisoners and can kill Kable himself. He kills another prisoner for no reason than to show Kable the resulting blood on his hands, and threatens to kill and/or rape Kable's wife and daughter. Through the rest of the film, while working with Castle, Hackman just keeps murdering people, especially innocents, left and right, clearly deriving sadistic joy from all the crimes he commits with his own hands.
Crazy Is Cool: The dance number/fight scene in Castle's mansion. It almost redeems the movie of wasting a perfectly good plot.
Designated Hero: As listed above, it's a little hard to root for Kable when he's just as willing to mindlessly slaughter people outside of being mind-controlled as inside. A key moment is when he kills Rick Rape (or rather, whichever poor bastard the guy with the "Rick Rape" screenname is pupeetering) by snapping his spine, even though "Rick" is just as much a victim of the Society programming as Kable's wife.
Do Not Do This Cool Thing: The movie glorifies and fetishizes that which it rails against. The ostensible message may be that violent media takes away our basic humanity, but it spends an uncomfortable amount of time making violence look cool.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Rick Rape had become a favorite of certain viewers, with his over-the-top antics and sheer audacity of his persona.
Fetish Retardant: Everything that happens in "Society". Everything. Most likely Justified considering 1) they're all mind-controlled human beings, adding a layer of creepiness to them, and 2) if you give people the freedom to do whatever they want, that includes things no one else wanted to see or do.
Ham and Cheese:
- Michael C. Hall as Ken Castle is just a joy to sit through.
- Terry Crews' performance as Hackman also qualifies, especially when he starts Shatnering his way through "I've Got No Strings On Me".
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- "Humanz" is La Résistance? Are you sure we're not talking about a Gorillaz album?
- Hearing Castle expositing his video game "Society" its relation to normal human civilization as "We live in society" became exponentially more hilarious by the end of The New '10s thanks to Memetic Mutation.
Just Here for Godzilla: Reviews both good and bad highlight Michael C. Hall as possibly the only reason to see the movie.
Narm:
- Everyone gratuitously swearing all the time is obviously meant to convey how desensitized and degenerated society has become ^note, but chances are that you will be pressed not to find it utterly hilarious as the end result is that pretty much every character either sound like drunken sailors or teenagers who have just discovered the concept of swearing.
- Simon refers to one of the options on his computer as "retardedly gay." While it was most likely supposed to satire the immature profaneness of young male gamers, or could just be a sign of the movie being made in the 2000's, it's still an insanely cringeworthy thing to hear out loud.
Nightmare Fuel: Aside from having this stuff in your brain that lets others control you against your will, there is a scene early on where an Avatar can hear an enemy approaching from somewhere behind him, but his player has him camping at a window and won't let him turn around.
One-Scene Wonder: Keith David as federal agent...Keith.
Signature Scene: The dance/fight sequence in which Castle takes control of multiple inmates to attack Kable is often regarded as the best scene in the movie, even by people who hated the film, due to being the only scene in the movie that looked like it was actually fun to make.
Spiritual Successor:
- This movie could easily be a remake of The Running Man.
- The movie is also the closest thing we'll ever get to Unreal Tournament: The Movie. Condemned contestants being forced to kill other people for their enjoyment, as well as some of them being promised freedom should they won? Check. A multimillionaire leading a MegaCorp who is behind the game and makes everyone fight for their lives for his and everyone else's enjoyment? Check. The only missing thing, aside of the Second Life shenanigans? A robot or armored human as the Final Boss.
Squick: Kable's wife is being controlled by a sweaty, morbidly obese man with no shirt.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Hackman is built up as a major threat to Kable and Terry Crews performance was regarded as one of the better things about the movie. However he is mainly relegated to just being a henchman that only occasionally pops up and come time of the climax is easily defeated by Kable due to Castle controlling him-which was criticized by many as a wasted chance not to have a major battle between him (Hackman) and Kable.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- So you've got this "Society" concept. Here are some things you could do with that:
  - You could explore how government might legislate what you're allowed to do with somebody else's bodies; after all, a contract selling yourself into slavery is not a legal, binding contract in most countries. What changed in the culture that would even allow such a thing? Or is it an illegal service, like prostitution, that is available in the darker corners of the populace?
  - You could explore what happens to a society when poor people are timesharing their bodies with the rich. What you have here is the very personification of the wealthy fucking the lower classes, that concept made manifest.
  - What kind of paranoid culture might grow from the news of technology that would literally allow you to control someone else's body, how could you regulate it, and how could regular people possibly believe any regulation on it is effective?
  - What about the disabled? Would you get a lot of crippled people taking other people's bodies just to experience walking again? Would the blind be able to see through someone else's eyes?
    
    The possibilities are endless. So what do they do with it? Stage a bunch of hyperactively-edited action sequences, which ultimately ends in a villain who's too stupid to live.
- Same goes with "Slayers", the game that the movie focuses on before shifting attention over to something else. It would be better to know a little bit more about the game.
Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The characters in this movie are either sociopathic monsters, obnoxious jerkasses, or people who are so one-dimensional that it's very hard to care for them. Kable isn't safe either, as he too is a psychopath even outside of "Slayers", willing to kill random people, and snaps Rick Rape's spine just because he was hitting on his wife, even though Rick wasn't in control of his actions. The only real likable character is Ken Castle, mainly because of Michael C. Hall's gloriously silly performance. And he's the friggin' villain.

YMMV / Gamer

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