Gamer isn't yet another miserable movie based on a video game -- it just feels like one.

In fact, this joyless, head-throbbing Running Man rip-off turns out to be based on excruciatingly very little. Not on compelling writing, certainly. Or coherent filmmaking. Or intriguing characters. Or good taste or common sense or any sensation that's remotely appealing, thrilling or entertaining.

It is, in the end, a migraine in search of a movie-goer, one that hypocritically berates pop-culture's bloodthirst even as it eagerly quenches it with a sadistic barrage of severed limbs and crushed skulls.

Behind the camera -- and in full-tilt seizure mode -- are directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the Retalin-deprived duo responsible for the two Crank films that starred Jason Statham as a hit man who proves ludicrously resilient to death.

Last year Statham starred in his own grungy futuristic inmates-as-gladiators thriller in Death Race, a retread I guiltily enjoyed because for all its raucous stupidity and repellent violence, it had the self-awareness of disposable fun. Gamer, by comparison, is bleak and leaden, an epileptic cartoon as sour as the grimace on Gerard Butler's face.

Butler -- who appears intent on squandering his post-300 career -- stars as Kable, a death-row prisoner who, thanks to the advent of mind-control technology, is a pawn in a murderous multi-player online game in which players pit human avatars against each other, gladiatorial games for geeks, if you will. Among these so-called Slayers, there's no bigger star -- sensationally watched by millions around the globe -- than Kable, who's in turn controlled by a 17-year-old brainiac named Simon (Logan Lerman).

Of course what Kable, a remarkably sensitive sort as far as convicts go, really wants is to be reunited with his wife and child -- a desire that pits himself squarely against the game's designer Ken Castle (Dexter's Michael C. Hall in easily the film's most engaging performance), an enigmatic billionaire with the brain of Bill Gates, the hucksterism of Richard Dawson and the humanitarian streak of Dick Cheney.

Then again, Kable's tough-as-nails determination to return home to his wife makes a little more sense when we see her: Amber Valletta, who spends a good portion of the movie bending over in a teeny pair of bright blue shorts that would make Megan Fox blush.

Neveldine and Taylor are equally subtle with their social commentary. There are digs at U.S. health care and the prison system, as well as the field of online gaming in which disconnected people interact via digital drones. How far will society eventually go for vicarious thrills? How detached from violence will humanity someday become as technology isolates us from real-life consequences?

Apparently these are among the questions we're meant to ponder when not gawking at the numerous naked breasts on display or Valletta's remarkable, um, shorts.

Not surprisingly -- and why this review is appearing today -- Gamer wasn't screened for critics. If only the studio could have extended the same courtesy to all audiences permanently.

(This film is rated R)
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