By JEFF CRAIG --
HOLLYWOOD -- You've got two choices.
You can just sit back and be taken away by it all, or you can examine it carefully and have to deal with the frustration of not quite understanding the inconsistencies.
Are we talking about Michael Douglas' movie The Game - or are we talking about Michael Douglas' career?
Both, really.
The actor who parlayed a family name (dad is, of course, Kirk Douglas) and TV cop-show drama fame (Streets of San Francisco) into an Oscar-winning career as a producer (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) has been as unpredictable as he has successful.
He's starred in wonderful films - Wall Street, for which he won an acting Oscar - and been at the centre of high-profile disappointments, such as Shining Through or The Ghost and the Darkness.
And just as he's sinking into a rut with sex themes like those of Basic Instinct and Disclosure and supermarket tabloid gossip of requiring treatment for a sex addiction (denied), he comes out with the charming and romantic American President and is the executive producer at the helm of one of last summer's biggest hits, Face/Off.
Which brings us to this week's top video release, the action-thriller The Game.
An unusual and refreshingly original film from David Fincher, the brains behind Alien 3 and Seven, The Game is, like Douglas' career, puzzling if one takes too close a look.
Douglas, in a role reminiscent of his Wall Street character, plays Nicholas Van Orton, a multimillionaire void of any emotional stability and therefore easily manipulated outside of the boardroom.
When his black sheep brother (played by Sean Penn - who chews up the screen delightfully, if all-too briefly - gives him a card for his 48th birthday, he's intrigued.
The card invites him to play a sophisticated and mysterious game run by a sophisticated and mysterious corporation.
Van Orton accepts - only to find that quitting isn't in the cards and that the stakes are constantly rising.
His $600-million fortune is at risk, as is, perhaps, his life, as he's manipulated in gloriously confusing and conflicting manners.
And so, too, is the audience - which is the trick at the heart of The Game. The film attempts to sweep the viewer into playing, alternatively tricking the on-screen characters as well as the people in the front row of the theatre and, in doing so, takes a few shortcuts around what should really be a more plausible plot.
But as long as you're willing to play, The Game has the inventive and great visuals we've come to expect from Fincher and doesn't have a bad performance in it: Besides Douglas and Penn, Vancouver actress Deborah Unger is fabulous and would have stolen the film away from most other leading men.
Visually stunning and well performed ... you can't ask for much more.
Just don't expect the film to bear up to repeated viewings, because that's when the veneer of the thin plot shatters.
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