THESE JOKERS ARE WILD

By RICHARD CORLISS

Let's play a game. I'm in charge, but you don't know who I am. You don't know the purpose of the game. In fact, you know only one thing: you're It. You go home, turn on your TV and find newsman Daniel Schorr insulting you. Your ballpoint pen leaks all over your expensive shirt. You are given keys but not told what they unlock. Then things get nasty. Someone is framing you, trying to drown you, shooting at you. Uh-oh. It's dawning on you: this "game" is not a game.

Watching a movie is a consensual act of sadomasochism. Sado: the people making the film are going through torture to entertain us. Maso: they are also torturing us with the whip of seductiveness and the clamps of suspense. In most films this unholy relationship is tacit; we suspend disbelief, forget our connivance in the covenant. The Game yanks this affair center screen and dares the viewer not only to think about it but also to feel it--feel creepy, feel scared, feel guilty.

The picture's pedigree offers fair warning. Its director is Master Meanie David Fincher (Seven). The writers are John Brancato and Michael Ferris, who threw Sandra Bullock into The Net. And the star is Michael Douglas, who has built a healthy career (Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Disclosure) playing bright, smuggish organization men for whom everything spins horribly out of whack.

This time he's Nicholas Van Orton, super-rich investment banker, too busy to pay attention to his ex-wife--"She married a pediatrician or a gynecologist, or a pediatric gynecologist"--and too stuffy to bond with his rakehell brother Conrad (Sean Penn). As a birthday present, Conrad gives Nick a card for CRS, Consumer Recreation Services, an outfit that devises elaborate, personalized games for select clients. And now Nick is the lucky--or doomed--fellow chosen to play. Nick is It.

Perhaps a relative wants to relieve Nick of his fortune. Or CRS is the ultimate evil conglomerate, or the prank of some zillionaires with a severe weird streak. In The Game anything is possible. But not everything is plausible. By the end, you must accept that dozens of people are willing to put Nick in jeopardy--and that other people, bless 'em, have a Job-like ability to be the butt of a cosmic joke.

Fincher's style is so handsomely oppressive, and Douglas' befuddlement is so cagey, that for a while the film recalls smarter excursions into heroic paranoia (The Parallax View, Total Recall). But, Fincher would say, it's your choice whether to be tantalized or exasperated. If the movie works, it's because you believe, for a couple of hours, that you are Nick. You are not playing the game; The Game is playing you.

--By Richard Corliss