We don't expect much from the Action/Adventure aisle.
It's not that violence precludes sense—even a pretty splattery horror movie can be more good or less and give you something to think about or not. I think the limiting factor is that while a horror movie can, but needn't, be about various dreadful ways to die, the kind of Action/Adventure picture which was invented and apparently perfected in the Eighties pretty much does have to be about jumping and shooting and yelling, and any political/criminal/romantical pretext can do no more than give the jumping shooters something to yell about. The motivation for multiple gruesome murders can itself be Horrible but all the necessary details of a political situation can only detract from Action, so the less said about it the better. Action/Adventure is the perfect genre for us these days because it must always and only be about means, never about goals or reasons.
So given that it's an empty form in the first place it would be senseless to criticize a picture like John Frankenheimer's Reindeer Games for its violations of sense or physics—you may as well say it doesn't have enough dance numbers. Nevertheless, you can still say that even an Action/Adventure picture goes too far in its pursuit of senselessness when it goes to work erasing the distinction between possible and impossible, happened and didn't, sense and nonsense.
The distinction eraser most favored by those responsible for Reindeer Games is the plot twist, a device movie fabricators have gotten so enthusiastic about and made so generic that lately it's disorienting to see a movie with a plot that only goes in one direction. The natural habitat of the plot twist is the screwball comedy, where it serves the necessary purpose of letting the characters smack their foreheads periodically and say "Holy Moses!" It has a long history of appearing in other sorts of stories too, such as the thriller, but in those genres it's traditionally been used more sparingly than nowadays—partly from a sense of taste and restraint which no longer exists and also because in these cases it's usually there to introduce a significant new element or premise, which is something you can't do every ten minutes: in The Third Man Harry Lime isn't dead; in Vertigo Kim Novak is both those girls.
The current plague of twists has probably fallen upon us because for the past fifteen or twenty years movie makers like the Coen brothers have been twisting up everything they've put their hands to. This coincides with the invention of the modern Action/Adventure picture, and so after the straight-line possibilities natural to that genre had been (quickly) exhausted it probably seemed like a good idea to complexify the things by liberal use of the twist as a special effect. One good twist deserves another and now we find ourselves at Reindeer Games, where in a topological anomaly the plot is composed entirely of its own twists. That turns out not to be nearly as interesting as it sounds.
It goes like this: The guy (Ben Affleck) pretends to be his dead cellmate so he can hook up with the girl (Charlize Theron). Her brother (Gary Sinise) shows up and wants Dead Cellmate to guide the gang through the big heist. The Affleck guy tries to reveal his real identity to no avail, and so pretends to help them instead. Oh, but actually the girl's seeming brother is her boyfriend and they were setting up the dead cellmate together; the Affleck guy pretends not to have discovered this. Many bullets pass; the loot is stolen in such a way that all secondary characters die. Oh, but actually the girl is the dead cellmate's girlfriend and he isn't dead and they were setting up the brother boyfriend, so everyone left except for the Affleck guy is killed somehow and he makes it home in time for Christmas dinner with his family.
Got it? It doesn't matter. The practical effect of this cavalcade of big switcheroonies is that by the time the last one or two are revealed the reaction you're bound to have is, "Yeah? So what?" The movie has gone through several iterations of lying to you about the state of affairs it's supposed to be representing, for no reason at all except to see the surprised look on your face when it tells you what the REAL real truth is.
The movie throws another major dissignificance before you even get to the theater by the strange trick of having an incorrect title. The use of a phrase like "Reindeer Games" as a movie's title is what in the cultural containment business we call a "reference." The point of making a reference is to suggest that some kind of analogy exists between the phrase or image you've borrowed and the thing to which you've attached it. The movie Reindeer Games doesn't have an analogous or any other relationship to the happy song from which it takes its name: "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is about McCarthyite-type blacklisting and the triumph of the individual over conventional mores; Reindeer Games has a bunch of movie characters screwing each other over just because they're all movie characters. Using the phrase from the song as the title for no reason this way decouples the phrase from its culturally agreed-upon meaning—which in the case of this particular phrase is the only meaning it can have—and substitutes nothing for it. This anti-use of the phrase gets worked into the dialogue about halfway through when Sinise, warning Affleck not to try and pull any fast ones, says "Don't be playing no reindeer games with me!" What—don't have me participate in any recreations from which we're going to exclude someone else? Or did the song mean that Rudolph was never permitted to con the other reindeer?
Finally, it may just be me but I also picked up some significant if less essential desensifications issuing from the cast. Gary Sinise, for example, never unfurrows his brow the whole time—it was as though the whole confabulation were actually a weird dream he was having and he couldn't understand why he had to be so mean. The soft-serv prettiness of Charlize Theron neither confirmed nor denied the feelings or motives of any of her character's three mutually exclusive manifestations. Her last shot—spread-eagled across the flaming hood of a car going over a cliff—doesn't seem like any sort of hard-earned comeuppance; just one more crazy gig that she'll lie her way out of before she hits the bottom. Weirdest was the softer-serv prettiness of Ben Affleck: even if he had only known two facial expressions before he went to prison I'll bet he'd have learned a couple more while he was in there. What really caught me off-guard though was an early scene where Sinise has Affleck on his knees with a gun to his head and is telling him, "Nick, you'd better help us pull this heist or we'll kill you," and Affleck's all, "But I'm Rudy and I can't help you," but Sinise insists, "Well okay Nick, but if you don't help us we're going to kill you." So I, identifying with the protagonist as you're supposed to, was thinking "Jeez—you guys are just nuts. You're being TOTALLY unreasonable AND I can't help you. This is too much trouble. Go ahead and kill me. Shoot me! Shoot me now!" So I was sort of surprised when instead of sensibly giving up this way he chooses a rather tedious path of deception. Affleck doesn't just fail to make me believe in him as some kind of felon—he doesn't even make me believe that he might want to keep living.
Reindeer Games overflows with things it isn't saying. It never says it's not worth it to keep living—it just makes you feel sleepy and annoyed that you might have to. It never says words and their meanings are slippery and changeable—it just doesn't think to use them to mean anything. It doesn't even say that history exists to be rewritten by those in power—it simply forgets at each instant that anything ever did happen before now, and it would be surprised if you tried to remember. What's to remember? What's to mean? Jump! Shoot! Yell! After a while everything will segue into the Christmas dinner you've been fantasizing about all along.
