Reindeer Games (2000)

Starring: Ben Affleck, Charlize Theron, Gary Sinise, Dennis Farina, Donal Logue, Danny Trejo, Ashton Kutcher, and Isaac Hayes, with a cameo from Ron Jeremy
Grade: C-

Isaac Hayes’s role in the prison scene was about as odd as it gets, but it’s something I think about all the time. Take with that what you will.

Summary

After seeing numerous dead people dressed in Santa suits, we jump back to six days before.

Through narration, Rudy Duncan (Affleck) tells us how he’s been in a maximum-security prison in Iron Mountain, Michigan for grand theft auto, finishing up his five-year sentence. His best friend is Nick Cassidy (James Frain), who’s also being released with Rudy in a couple of days, just in time for Christmas. In the yard, Rudy and Nick talk about the first things they will do once they are released. Rudy is proud to say he’s going to get a mug of hot chocolate and a slice of pecan pie. On the other hand, Nick talks about Ashley (Theron), the girl he’s been writing back and forth with for quite some time. Apparently, they got a motel room set up as soon as he’s released. Rudy jokingly doubts that Ashley is the person she says she is. Later, Rudy sees that fellow prisoner Alamo (former NFL Defensive Player of the Year Dana Stubblefield) got released from solitary, and he wants Rudy dead because he thinks Rudy snitched on him after witnessing a fight that he was involved in. Rudy and Nick go back to their cell, and Nick reads off some of the love letters between him and Ashley, with Rudy listening in. The next day at the cafeteria, Rudy and Nick get their food. Immediately after, Rudy comes face to face with Alamo. Rudy swears he didn’t say anything, but Alamo doesn’t respond and walks past him. He just sits at a faraway table and stares at Rudy. At their table, Nick tells Rudy that Ashley’s brother is a truck driver, and he may be able to get Nick some work. Fellow prisoner Zook (Hayes) notices a cockroach in the gelatin he was eating and flips out. This causes a frenzy in the cafeteria because it turns out there are cockroaches in a majority of the prisoners’ food.

Somehow, this turns into a big brawl, so Alamo uses this opportunity to rush over to Rudy and Nick.

Nick pushes Rudy out of the way but is stabbed and killed by Alamo. Rudy narrowly avoids death as well, using his tray to block Alamo’s knife. Alamo is taken down by the guards, as Rudy holds Nick until he bleeds out. That night, a saddened Rudy reads some of the love letters between Nick and Ashley. The next morning, Rudy is released. As prisoners meet with their loved ones, Rudy sees Ashley there waiting for Nick. Though he initially decides to get on the bus to avoid Ashley, he is inspired by seeing a couple on the bus making out. He decides to leave the bus and introduce himself to her, assuming Nick’s identity. After they talk at a diner and Rudy lies his ass off, they go back to the motel and have sex. The next day, Rudy tosses his license in the toilet just so Ashley continues to think he’s Nick.

She buys Rudy some clothes and is the happiest girl in the world. Not wanting to ruin the moment, Rudy promises to the deceased Nick that he’ll tell her the truth once the holidays are over. Together, they head back to the motel. As she goes to the front desk by herself to say they don’t want to be disturbed, Rudy goes into the room alone. There, he is attacked by a group of guys (Trejo, Logue, Clarence Williams III) until they are stopped by the ringleader in Gabriel Mercer (Sinise), Ashley’s brother. They are all under the assumption that Rudy is Nick. Just then, Ashley walks in and is immediately apprehended by the group. Gabriel threatens Rudy heavily for getting involved with his sister. Rudy admits he’s not actually Nick and tells Gabriel the truth about everything, including wanting to take Nick’s place to fuck Gabriel’s sister, which obviously doesn’t help his case. Gabriel holds Rudy at gunpoint and asks Ashley if Rudy is Nick, so she says he is, and it saves his life.

Next, Rudy and Ashley are thrown in the back of a semi-truck. Ashley tells Rudy in the truck that Gabriel read the love letters between “them”, and he knows “Nick” worked for a casino. Rudy accuses Ashley of setting up the real Nick and tells her he can’t help because he’s not actually Nick. Ashley understands he’s not Nick but pleads with him to help Gabriel because he has no problem killing people. Gabriel stops the truck in the middle of nowhere and reads off one of Nick’s old letters to Rudy and Ashley. In this letter, Nick talked about how he used to work security at this Indian casino and pretty much knows all the ins and outs of the place. Rudy explains the whole thing to Gabriel on who Nick was and how he’s not him, so Gabriel decides to kill him. They point a gun to his head, so Rudy relents and “admits” he’s Nick Cassidy. They almost don’t believe him, but he passes a quick round of questions from Gabriel about Ashley.

Now, Rudy is stuck helping Gabriel and his associates in orchestrating a heist of the casino Nick used to work at, despite never having any experience in doing anything like this and not knowing anything about the casino they are robbing. Adding to this mess, Ashley reveals to Rudy that Gabriel and his crew have never actually robbed anyone before.

My Thoughts:

I wanted to like this. I really did, purely because I’m a big fan of Ben Affleck. Sadly, his piss-poor decision-making in choosing roles has given him a major hit-or-miss catalogue of films. Look no further than a film like Reindeer Games. For every Good Will Hunting and Armageddon, he has just as many Reindeer Games and Paycheck-like films to make up for it.

In this Christmas-themed action thriller, Affleck is about as entertaining as he could possibly be in the situations given to him. Despite the script being as awful as it is, it’s passable fare for action movie fans. However, it cannot be stressed enough how bad this script is. From the shoehorning of holiday/Christmas phrases into regular conversations to a convoluted plot that has one twist too many, the screenplay is so terrible that it made the acting even worse. At times, Affleck acts as if he’s acknowledging to the audience how bad the movie actually is. His energy onscreen felt like he knew the movie was ridiculous and then acted accordingly to this carefree thought. Seriously, there’s a few points where he delivers certain lines as if to say, “Can you believe they’re actually making me say this?”. Honestly, he looked like he had some fun because of how stupid it got, and it made the movie watchable when it shouldn’t have been. On countless occasions, Affleck’s Rudy sings the “Little Drummer Boy” to himself or talks to himself in the mirror about the conflicts he finds himself in, but it takes you out of the experience because of how unrealistic it is. Does anyone actually act like this? Then, there’s just plain idiocy. To totally assume the identity of Nick, did Rudy really need to throw his license out, even though he makes it clear that he will be admitting the truth to her after the holidays are over? Did he really need to do something that crazy to hide this from her? Is Rudy this much of an anomaly that he acts like this in real life? I doubt it. The screenplay for Reindeer Games just tries to center itself completely around big moments to hammer the point home of this being an unpredictable action thriller, but what it did instead was make itself an illogical mess that was funnier than it intended to be but not as good of an action movie as we wanted.

Here’s a solid question for everyone: Did this really need to take place during Christmas time? Obviously, this idea is the only thing setting itself apart from other action movies, but the amount of forced humor and lines crammed into this screenplay to give it a “Christmas feel” only hurt it. There is an ANNOYING number of puns and references to Christmas-related themes, and it’s corny as all hell, especially when the villains through it into the conversation at the weirdest times. It just never meshed, despite this being the entire heart of the premise. We don’t really realize it until Gabriel, at his most menacing, tells Rudy to not play any “Reindeer Games” with him, invoking the title of the film in the line but also reminding us front and center that no human actually talks like this. At this point, it was like the fifth Christmas pun of the movie too. When you have the “dastardly” villain say the line and you roll your eyes, this should be a serious indication that what you are doing is not working. It was already snowy out. All you needed was for one or two characters to talk about Christmas coming up and keep the “Santa suit” climax, and the audience would have gotten the point. They didn’t have to overdo it to the point where we wanted to puke a little bit, as was the case here. The only time the Christmas theme worked was the final minute of the movie, but by then, it was too late, especially because the ending was so outrageous.

Going along with this…

Without spoiling it, the ending and the big “reveal” of the film was completely asinine. Leading up to the final ten minutes, there were already way too many twists that made me start to lose interest (even before the robbery goes down). This is mostly because at every twist, the writer chose the boring option instead of the one that could have spiced up this run-of-the-mill story. This leads us directly to the ending, giving us yet another twist that is so improbably for a regular criminal, you would think a comic book supervillain came up with it. It’s preposterous in every sense of the word. It changed everything for the worse and though it gave us good action in the climax, it didn’t fit the story or the characters we were building at all. Sometimes this “shock” can work, but the key is that you have to show the audience why something like this is technically reasonable in the realm of the movie. Up until a certain point, everything seemed relatively plausible (just stupid in regard to the dialogue). Even all the unnecessary twists in the first two acts don’t seem crazy far-fetched, but the ending ruins it all, throwing everything out of whack because it doesn’t make sense character-wise. There’s not a single notion beforehand to show the viewer why these characters are capable of some masterminded plot because it would take a serious level of genius to pull it off. You can’t just pick some regular old criminal to do it unless there’s a small inkling of this secret when they’re introduced. This is what makes everything so frustrating. To write a screenplay, you have to make sense of everything and show why this is all in the realm of possibility.

Reindeer Games said, “Fuck it” and threw this idea at a wall because you would never see it coming, and that’s why a sour taste is left in our mouths when we leave. We were trying to give this a chance because we love action movies at Cinema Loco. A lot of the time, I will give these movies the benefit of the doubt because they can be a bit wild in presentation but still be over-the-top fun. However, Reindeer Games tries to be mysterious and add a little extra flavor to make things more than just a regular action movie, but it fails so hard for being this careless that it brings the final production down more. Since this was a regular heist movie with some basic ass criminals, this wild decision in the reveal pushes us too many steps past the line of believability. It made an average movie even worse and though it gave us more action and explosions, it wasn’t worth it because you’re sitting at the screen shouting, “What? How is he- but how? What? There’s no way!”.

Why put a car thief behind a wheel of a car? Yeah, that’s a great question Rudy. Why did they?

This movie does get credit for taking place in what Gabriel so eloquently puts it as, “bum-fuck Michigan”. You don’t see a lot of movies taking place in Michigan, so that’s nice. Additionally, watching Ashton Kutcher getting beat up was pretty funny. We actually get this cool moment between him and Affleck, which had me come to the realization that they have never shared the screen before or since. So, this was pretty cool to see.

Charlize Theron’s Ashley is all over the place in performance and characterization. You can tell something is wrong with her right from the start. I’m not sure if that was the intention or not, but she was just too overly innocent to believably mail a prisoner back-and-forth and hope for the best. She got naked though, so that’s a “W”. Though Gary Sinise was in his best shape ever for the role of Gabriel, aptly nicknamed “Monster”, he still couldn’t rise above the “stereotypical bad guy in an action movie” character. It was decent and all, but it’s exactly what you would expect. Even so, this is more the writing’s fault rather than Sinise’s.

The only way this film could have been saved was if they leaned more into the comedic side of things. There are some funny moments in the film that are fairly unexpected, and it works in spurts, even if the whole does tend to get cringeworthy at times (and totally unfunny at other times). When you factor in the subject matter, and the whole thing happening during Christmas time, you need to inject a little humor to lighten things up. It helps because the movie is goofy as hell when you think about it. Rudy being forced to be the ultimate bullshitter and orchestrating a heist when he has no prior experience is pretty amusing stuff. They took themselves way too seriously as is. The humor needed to be capitalized on more considering the circumstances. If anything, this should have been more of an action comedy rather than an action thriller. A full rewrite with this in mind could have actually made this concept work. You could have even recast the lead. As much as I like Affleck, he would need a great script to make an action comedy version of Reindeer Games work. If you change the tone into something lighter and inserted a comic actor in his place, it might have killed two birds with one stone.

Then, you could put Denis Leary in Gary Sinise’s role, and you got a decent little comedy on your hands for the year 2000.

Reindeer Games is not devoid of entertainment. Ben Affleck tries his apathetic best with a shitty screenplay, and there are some spurts of decent humor and action. Nevertheless, if you think you have another Christmas movie on your hands worth watching around the holiday season, you are sadly mistaken.

Fun Fact: Vin Diesel was originally cast as henchman Pug (Donal Logue’s role in the movie), but he dropped out over certain disagreements with the character and script. Damn, seeing Vin Diesel face off against Ben Affleck would have been kind of cool.