NA IGRE (HOOKED) Review

Quite simply one of the best films about video games and gaming culture ever made, Pavel Sanaev's Na Igre succeeds where so many others have failed for a very simple reason: rather than getting bogged down in actual games or game play he has instead created an action packed foray into the minds and lives of the people who play.

Max and his friends are a typical group of college-aged kids, struggling to figure out who there while making their way through school.  The one thing that makes them different is that they are all competitive gamers, their skills so sharp that they have actually become profitable - a competition at the beginning of the film netting Max enough ready cash to pay his next semester's tuition.  More importantly, the win also gives Max and each of his friends an advance copy of a new game by the competition's sponsor - a game that, unknown to them, contains a flaw that will overwhelm their computers and their minds, planting within each of them in real life the video game skills they are so blessed with in the virtual world.  In an instant these twenty something year old kids become gifted martial artists.  Perfect marksmen.  Brilliant drivers.  Flawless tacticians with the skills needed to execute any wild scheme they may dream up.

You can imagine the results.  First to discover his power is Max, who quickly puts his fighting skills to use to protect a beautiful classmate from the lewd advances of a local thug.  In a lesser film, Max would succeed and get the girl but in this film?  Well, Sanaev has something a little different in mind.  Because, you see, in real life you can't take down a group of four gangsters without facing serious repercussions and before the end of the day Max is ambushed, bound and locked into a warehouse locker, awaiting a date with a local blast furnace before the end of the day.  That is, awaiting a date with a blast furnace unless his friends can rescue him.

And so on they come, armed only with paintball guns, only to discover that Max's warehouse prison is also a staging ground for a group of highly trained and heavily armed mercenaries in transit to a job.  It immediately becomes a case of kill or be killed and the friends dispatch the trained fighters with shocking - and incredibly stylish - ease, taking Max with them while leaving behind a room full of bloody corpses.  Their games have become real life and the group - with the exception of Max, who is appalled - are clearly high on the adrenaline boasting about the number of frags they have each scored, with no thought or concern given at all for the fact that each of their kills is a real, actual human being rather than a digital sprite on a screen.

Sanaev's film - the first of two parts, with the second due for release in February - may very well be the smartest, sharpest and most commercially viable picture yet to emerge from the current wave of Russian genre film.  Enormously technically proficient and absolutely loaded with fantastic set pieces Na Igre - more importantly - maintains a sharp focus on its characters, creating an instantly recognizable range of very true to life players and taking them through a surprisingly realistic scenario.  Realistic, that is, once you accept the core premise of computer skills being transferred into real life.  The young cast is uniformly stellar, the rush of adrenaline and lure of easy cash entirely believable, the presence of unscrupulous men on the sidelines prepared to use and manipulate these newly gifted youngsters perfectly inevitable.  Hugely entertaining and blessed with serious character and philosophical underpinnings, Na Igre is a clear winner.