`Reindeer Games” is a Christmas present that arrived late; looking at it, you can see why. This new heist movie by the great thriller director John Frankenheimer flails around like its own dysfunctional gang of casino robbers: a confused bunch led by hot-tempered Gary Sinise and advised by an “inside man” (Ben Affleck) who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Everybody talks big and packs a lot of heat, but they’re almost all in a clueless funk.
So, ultimately, is the movie. It’s a heist without a plan, a crime without a brain, a thriller without a decent script: a movie that tries to win the prize by just walking in and blowing up the place.
Affleck, a brainy leading man, is the center of the dubious action. He plays car thief Rudy Duncan, a recently released convict who assumes the identity of his deceased former cellmate Nick (James Frain) — knifed in a prison brawl — when Rudy discovers Nick’s ravishingly beautiful pen-pal Ashley (Charlize Theron) waiting outside the walls.
Rudy knows succulent Ashley from her letters, which Nick constantly read to him; but Ashley, was never sent a photo of Nick. She accepts Rudy’s counterfeit with ravishing ease.
From this first misstep, Rudy soon find himself plunging deeper and deeper into an icy lake of danger and death.
Ashley’s brutal long-haired trucker/gunrunner brother Gabriel (Sinise) suddenly appears: with his sinister buddies (Clarence Williams III, Donal Logue and dead-eyed tattooed Danny Trejo), expecting “Nick” to supply them with the lowdown on the Native American casino where he once worked. Once Gabriel enters the scene, all hell breaks loose for the rest of the picture.
That’s enough of a synopsis for this movie, which depends on a constant stream of surprises and shouldn’t have too many tipped beforehand.
But it isn’t enough just to surprise an audience; we have to feel that the twists are legitimate, that everything finally makes sense — as most of the audience does when they watch movies like “The Sixth Sense” and “The Usual Suspects.” Given the fact that the script here — with all hose hairpin twists and turns — ultimately doesn’t make much sense and that the ending is several miles over the top, you have to applaud Frankenheimer, his actors and technicians for getting as much out of this movie as they do.
Certainly “Reindeer Games” may grip your interest for a while, excite you and make you laugh.
Like almost all Frankenheimer’s thrillers, from 1962’s “The Manchurian Candidate” to last year’s “Ronin,” the movie holds you in a narrative vise; it’s grim, funny, dark. Largely because of the direction and the actors — including Dennis Farina as the malcontent casino manager — it’s better than many of its type: just as bloody and preposterous, but with more personality.
But “Reindeer Games” fails the crucial test of a thriller: when the last twist is unscrewed and the last surprise unveiled, you’ll probably walk out of the theater feeling gypped. At least I did — and such is my regard for Frankenheimer’s work (especially his brilliant string of `90s TV docudramas, like “Against the Wall,” “The Burning Season” “George Wallace” and “Andersonville” — that I tried the movie twice. Both times, I felt robbed.
Almost entirely, that is due to the screenplay by Ehren Kruger, a hot young thriller writer-of-the-moment, thanks to last year’s overrated “Arlington Road” and this year’s lucrative assignment replacing Kevin Williamson on “Scream 3.”
I don’t think either of those scripts made much sense either — and “Scream 3” makes nonsense out of the two movies that preceded it as well. Kruger seems addicted to plots that breed conspiracy out of chaos and whose final twists never survive any kind of scrutiny.
How can the villains in “Arlington Road’ and “Scream 3” possibly predict or rely on their ridiculous plans (except for the fact that they know the writer is in their corner, pulling all the strings)? And how can anybody in their right mind have dreamed up what happens in the last few scenes of “Reindeer Games” –which only works if you take the entire screenplay as a practical joke on the audience or the heist genre. Kruger’s screenplay tries hard (but not hard enough) to be a dark, ironic, offbeat modern noir in the vein of “Pulp Fiction.” But it suffers from surprise-ending syndrome.
Kruger has had the potentially nifty idea of stetting his story entirely at Christmas but focusing on exactly that segment of the criminal underclass for whom Christmas means less another holiday and more another opportunity to break the bank and fleece the citizenry. “Reindeer Games” is the flipside of the Frank Capra-Norman Rockwell Yuletide vision, and Frankenheimer plays with Christmas icons and melodies throughout, including ironic uses of “Silver Bells” and “Little Drummer Boy” and one scene which recreates Norman Rockwell’s classic Christmas dinner Saturday Evening Post cover. But , like most of the script’s ideas, the irony gets snowed under with blood, thunder and witless turnabouts.
What works in the move are the visuals and the performances, especially Sinise’s hair trigger, brutally resentful Gabriel and Theron as the gorgeous but ambivalent Ashley. Affleck is too diffident as the trapped anti-hero, though it’s hard to blame him.
But Sinise and Theron, playing an embittered bottom-dog anxious for the gold ring and a woman whose allegiances are always in doubt, give their characters a terrific, melodramatic edge. Their work in almost the same way a classic noir performance from the `40s or `50s works — by Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum, Gloria Grahame or Barbara Stanwyck.
What does Frankenheimer do with all this? As much as he can.
Short of throwing out the entire script, or at least the ending, I don’t see how he could have done it much better. His grim flair for prison drama charges up the movie’s opening, and his genius for suggesting entrapment carries us through the rest. But you only have to compare the writing here with his best thrillers –George Axelrod’s adaptation of Richard Condon for “The Manchurian Candidate, ” Ernest Lehman’s (and others’) adaptation of Thomas Harris in “Black Sunday,” or Elmore Leonard’s adaptation of himself for “52 Pickup” (or even the partial rewrite David Mamet did for “Ronin”) to see what’s gone wrong in “Reindeer Games.” It’s a too-slick idea that never gels. Frankenheimer is a director who depends on good scripts — which is exactly what he had in all his `90s TV dramas but in fewer of his recent theatrical films. Let’s hope he gets one soon — or at least that he gets another good rewrite man.
“REINDEER GAMES”
(star) (star) 1/2
Directed by John Frankenheimer; written by Ehren Kruger; photographed by Alan Caso; edited by Tony Gibbs, Michael Kahn; production designed by Barbara Dunphy; music by Alan Silvestri; produced by Marty Katz, Bob Weinstein, Chris Moore. A Dimension Films release. Opens Friday. Running Time: 1:38. MPAA rating: R. Language, nudity, sensuality, violence.
THE CAST
Rudy Duncan …………. Ben Affleck
Ashley ……………… Charlize Theron
Gabriel …………….. Gary Sinise
Merlin ……………… Clarence Williams III
Jack Bangs ………….. Dennis Farina
Nick ……………….. James Frain
Zook ……………….. Isaac Hayes
