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[Highly rated reviewer]

Brutal! Bloody! Little bit mixed up.

This wasn’t quite what I was expecting, sure there’s plenty of blood and guts, people being variously killed and maimed via gunshot, grenade and speeding van but they are also trying to make a point, or even multiple points, about desensitisation of viewers to violence, lack of empathy for media reported carnage, etc. Though it would be pushing it a little to say they really make the viewer question their own complicity in this, blah, blah, blah. Especially when Gerard Butler picks up someone who is being directed by someone else via mind control and smashes the guy’s spine over his knee.

So, a little more detail: Gerard is on death row (for unlicensed osteopathy perhaps?), along with lots and lots of other people, and society has once again decided that if they survive enough episodes of a death-dealing, highly-rated tv show they get a pardon. Where do they get their ideas? The catch is they are controlled by a remote game player via said mind control. Gerard is nearly at the required 30 shows but guess what? Someone is being a bit dishonest and someone else again has their own agenda. Whoda thunk? It does have a slightly more complex plot than say the recent (also convict killing for TV ratings) Death Race and it tries to be a bit more political without squarely hitting the mark but essentially it’s a more complicated version of Running Man with the hero pretending not to have a Scottish accent rather than pretending not to have an Austrian accent, a less linear plot and a more exploratory approach to camera movement and colour pallet.

Above average brutality and in your face blood letting, even by modern action film standards!

Some pay to be controlled, others pay to control!

Unlike the previous reviewer, I did not find this movie particularly gory in terms of death scenes and carnage etc...The pace of this movie was not as tense and urgent as Crank's signature adrenalin pace.It's a decent action film with a surprise appearance from the 2 leads actors from my favourite 'Psyche' series as newsreaders. I do feel that the film makers could have given Butler a more defined,chiselled look, but instead he looked quite unkept and chubby faced, (nothing wrong with his physique though).I have seen several movies with similar plots , but this movie got me thinking that the whole idea of the movie is actually quite achieveable in the near future.And it's quite scary, for me it poses an important question: exactly how much control do we actually have over our own lives? Are we just living a silly illusion under the impression that we are completely free? This movie got me thinking about that after it finished: action movies do not normally linger in my memory after I walk out the movie house and for that alone, I have given it 3 stars.