Game Over, Man! movie review — A disgusting gore fest and tasteless buffoonery in the garb of comedy

Despite trying to make some meaningful commentary on matters such as homosexuality, drug addiction and harassment of women at the workplace, director Kyle Newacheck’s film Game Over, Man! is such a dumb and witless exercise that calling it a comedy film is perhaps the biggest insult that someone could possibly think of in the history of comedy films. If it is not taxing enough to sit through the medley of puerile humour and obnoxious dick jokes, the frequency with which the makers of this film keep blowing up bodies (both human and otherwise, believe it or not) — and that too in such excruciatingly gory detail — is frankly exhausting. By the end, you feel like you are going to throw up.

Still from Game Over, Man!

Alexxx (no typo there), Joel and Darren are three members of the housekeeping staff at an upscale Los Angeles hotel. The three friends are thick as thieves, but they hate their job more than anything else in the world. Together, they dream of turning entrepreneurs, but none of their ideas seem to fly because they simply don’t see eye to eye when it comes to execution. They also have trust issues, which renders their bromance less than something to aspire for. When they come to know that a rich and powerful social media influencer would be staying at their hotel, the three friends decide to pitch their latest idea to him — a motion capture powered suit that lets video game players control the characters they are playing. But when terrorists hijack the hotel and take scores of guests and staff as hostage, it is up to the bumbling trio to save the day.

To be fair to the makers, the film announces quite unabashedly that it’s a rip off of Die Hard — the big daddy of all action movies. But even for a spoof, the humour is far too infantile to have any effect. The jokes do not land, the silence after is awkward, there is virtually zero chemistry among the three friends and we do not find ourselves rooting for even a single character. Even the aforementioned commentary on serious issues comes too late in the film — and almost feels like a half-hearted apology being forced out of truant children who were never really sorry for laughing at gays and crotch slapping bosses.

Some of the scenes from the film are so gross that it’s difficult to comprehend how the film is being rated as ‘16 years and above’ by Netflix. There’s a scene, for instance, in which a hostage is asked to perform a sexual act on another hostage, and the two actually get into a long and painful act, that apparently turns them on, but makes us almost puke our guts out. Or another, in which a bomb is strapped on to an innocent little dog, and it is then thrown into the tank of an aquarium, where it tires itself out swimming from end to end, before it gets blown into smithereens. How these scenes can be considered comedy, one fails to understand.

Almost all the performances are over the top, there is plenty of hamming, and the humour is far too ambitious for its own good. The entire film stands on the rather shaky motive of the trio of protagonists trying to save their potential financier only because they want his money. Some of the sequences are so implausible that one just wants them to come to an end as quickly as possible. In the end, Game Over, Man! is a disgusting gore fest and tasteless buffoonery in the garb of comedy that relentlessly keeps dealing blow after blow to your finer sensibilities throughout its 100-minute length. I don’t know what is more horrifyingly disturbing — the film itself, or that scary self-appreciating post-credit scene at the end, announcing a sequel.

Game Over, Man! is currently running on Netflix, if you must know.