Game of Death

Released By: Optimum Home Entertainment
Price: £15.99
Availability: 21st February 2011

Agent Marcus (Wesley Snipes) follows a priest from a basketball session to his church and offers him the million dollars he is carrying with him. The priest (Ernie Hudson) says he won’t take the money unless this stranger tells him where the money is from and what weighs so heavily on his shoulders. Reluctantly, Marcus agrees and tells how, as a by-the-book covert agent, he appears to have been betrayed by his own. Marcus was sent deep undercover to find dirt on underworld crime boss and arms dealer Frank Smith (Robert Davi). But after six months, just as the operation is about to be completed, Smith suffers a heart-attack and the action shifts to the hospital he is rushed to. Unfortunately it appears Wesley’s previous colleagues have decided to go into business for themselves. Zander (Gary Daniels) and Floria (Zoe Bell) now want the dirty money for themselves and are more than happy to kill Marcus if he won’t join them. Can Marcus salvage the operation and save the staff of the medical facility at the same time?

Originally planned to be directed by Abel Ferrara, the veteran dropped out in 2009 and was replaced (apparently at the eleventh hour) by the somewhat less established Italian TV helmer, Giorgio Serafini. Unfortunately we’ll never know if a re-teaming of Ferrara and Snipes (they worked together on King of New York) would have worked and instead we have a movie that feels tired, formulaic and above all, quite lazy.

To say that Snipes is the best thing in the film is probably to damn it with faint praise as this is hardly his finest hour. The likes of Snipes, Ernie Hudson and Robert Davi remain the lynchpins largely because they simply have the least to say. The real crime here is not so much the formula but the achingly creaky script foisted upon its cast and which attempts to bind it loosely together. When, in the middle of a fire-fight, a character utters the phrase: “We killed him. He was your mentor,  but in many ways you considered him the father you never had, didn‘t you?” we’re clearly at the stage where there’s more clunky exposition than expected action.

Zoe Bell, a top-class stunt-woman and an up and coming actress has already talked disappointingly about the limited shoot of little more than two weeks and a changing-script and the result unfortunately shows with her character largely required to sneer, shoot insults and seemingly flout the common-sense rules of being a covert agent (if you‘re playing cat and mouse with someone, stop talking!). It’s also easy to see why Gary Daniels took the role - despite the film’s limitations -  as it sees him going toe-to-toe with a major action star and on the martial-arts front, the limited set-pieces at least give both men a chance to show why they’ve got as far as they have, but anyone buying this for such moments alone may think it takes far too long to get there and it’s all over far too quickly.

Relying far too much on camera-tricks such as plentiful cityscape shots, lens filters and double-exposure effects, Game of Death borrows the iconic Bruce Lee title and yet offers nothing new or relevant to the moniker. Even the DVD ‘extras’ consist solely of soundbytes of cast and crew expressing enthusiasm in a way that that suggests the praise of each other may be  genuine but they hope the cheque will clear.

Serafini’s style is competent but his small-screen TV credentials show far too much and there’s a real lack of big-screen finesse here. One hopes that if and when Snipes returns to screens after his ‘time away’ for tax problems, he’ll search out better material.

6/10
Daniel K Gray