If you are one of those die-hard Ben Affleck fans that absolutely adores him and must get your daily fix of him, I recommend going to see Boiler Room. Affleck’s part might be small in that film but it is memorable. He delivers some intelligent dialogue and does a great acting turn in Boiler Room, while his leading role in Reindeer Games is anything but memorable
Reindeer Games will only serve to disappoint those Affleck-starved masses that have followed his career since the release of Good Will Hunting a few years ago. Since his meteoric rise to stardom began, he has proven himself to be a charismatic and talented actor in films such as Chasing Amy and Armageddon. But for every excellent film he has made, Affleck has done an equal number of movies that were pure schlock (Phantoms and Forces of Nature, for example), and Reindeer Games can be counted among them.
As the film opens, we see Ben Affleck’s character Rudy serving out the final days of his prison sentence, looking forward to the freedom of life on the outside. But when his roommate Nick is killed two days before they both were to be released, Affleck feels obligated to inform Nick’s pen pal and love interest Ashley, played by Charlize Theron, about what happened.
However when he meets Ashley, he becomes so smitten with her that he pretends to be Nick, and that’s where the troubles begin both for Affleck and for the film itself. This type of mistaken identity is pure Hollywood, using a contrived plot device that they have run into the ground for years in films ranging from While You Were Sleeping all the way back to Some Like It Hot. This plot device is almost always played for laughs and has to be really clever to pull it off. Reindeer Games can’t quite get the laughs right, and by having Affleck impersonate someone else throughout the whole film, we can never get any sort of empathy with his character, because he doesn’t really have one.
More often that not, the film uses this case of mistaken identity as a way to build suspense. Ashley’s brother Monster, played by Gary Sinise, and his gang eventually kidnap them both. Unfortunately for Affleck, Monster wants to enlist their help in robbing the casino where Nick used to work, and he’s not asking for it nicely. Affleck spends most of the rest of the movie trying to convince his captors that he is not Nick. But then when they start to believe him and discover he is of no use, Affleck must convince them that he is Nick, so that they’ll need him and let him live. This 180-degree turn sometimes take place in the span of a few minutes and thus it never succeeds in its attempt to bring dramatic tension to the film.
Director John Frankenheimer has never been known for producing films of great quality (his most recent film, The Island of Dr. Moreau, was a bomb at the box office), and Reindeer Games is no exception. This film behaves like a bad B-movie you might find on late night cable, and the A-list talent featured in this movie can do nothing to raise it up from the depths.
Instead they get mired in its faults and are dragged down with the film. Gary Sinise’s ability to play a good villain, highlighted in previous films like Ransom and SnakeEyes, denigrates in this performance as Monster into a caricature, more suited for the comic strip Dick Tracy than for a serious film. Charlize Theron, who proved her acting ability recently in the Academy Award-nominated film The Cider House Rules, sinks considerably here while playing the unlikable and uninteresting character of Ashley.
Either as a comedy with very few laughs or as an action movie with practically no gripping, intense scenes of conflict, Reindeer Games falls short on so many levels. In the end it gets so wrapped up in pointless plot twists that the film cannot be saved. If Ben Affleck does not start choosing his future projects with more care, he is in serious danger of falling from the top just as quickly as he rose.
