The Game

Wealthy financier Nicholas Van Orton gets a strange birthday present from wayward brother Conrad: a live-action game that consumes his life.

• Director: David Fincher
• Genre:Adventure / Mystery / Thriller
• Runtime:129 minutes

Cast

Michael Douglas : Nicholas Van Orton
Sean Penn : Conrad Van Orton
Deborah Kara Unger: Christine
James Rebhorn : Jim Feingold
Peter Donat : Samuel Sutherland

Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is a successful, extremely wealthy businessman, but his success has come at the cost of his personal life. He is estranged from his ex-wife. On Nicholas’ 48th birthday, his younger, rebellious, brother Conrad (Sean Penn) presents him with an unusual gift — a game offered by a company called Consumer Recreation Services (CRS) – promising that it will change Nicholas’ life. The nature of The Game is unclear at first, but it appears to be a sort of live action role-playing game that integrates directly into the player’s real life.

After taking a lengthy psychological test and a physical exam, Nicholas is informed that CRS has rejected his “application” for The Game. However, he soon discovers the Game has not only begun, but it begins by focusing on a key traumatic moment of Nicholas’s life when, as a child, he witnessed his father committing suicide by leaping off the roof of their family home (the same home Nicholas lives in now) on his 48th birthday, the same one Nicholas is now “celebrating”. Evidence mounts that The Game is actually an elaborate and dangerous scheme. Each time Nicholas thinks he has uncovered the truth, he finds a new layer of complexity to it. The game escalates into a no-holds-barred assault on everything Nicholas values, and his carefully ordered life seems to be disintegrating around him as The Game takes control.

He encounters an employee of Consumer Recreation Services, a waitress who calls herself Christine (Unger), who at first assists him in escaping from the clutches of the increasingly violent CRS operatives, but after a series of narrow escapes and repeated attempts on his life, Nicholas realizes he has been drugged by Christine. He regains consciousness in a burial crypt in Southern Mexico in a symbolic premature burial, all the while knowing that the hundreds of millions of dollars in his and his company’s bank accounts have been drained by Christine and her associates. The Game is now revealed to be an elaborate scam to relieve the power elite of their property and, if necessary, of their lives.

Nicholas returns from Mexico to San Francisco by hitchhiking and begging rides, and as he believes that he has been alienated from his friends and his trusted lawyer, Nicholas comes to a realization about his life. He meets with and makes peace with his ex-wife, who has happily remarried and is about to give birth to her second child. But he becomes increasingly desperate and retrieves a hidden handgun from his ransacked home. He locates a CRS employee and threatens him. With the employee’s security clearance, he heads directly into CRS offices and takes Christine hostage. Read more

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