by Ryan Macdonald

Being a die hard cinephile and a committed employee is sometimes a hard thing to reconcile, especially if you don’t have a job in the film industry. So looking back, it doesn’t really surprise me that Sunday was not, as the rhyme scheme would indicate, “funday”. I overbooked myself a little, working the day shift and buying a ticket for the 4:00PM showing of Na igre (Hooked) at SIFF Cinema. Leaving work, I was already running ten minutes late. But breezing over 520 with minimal traffic, I was eerily optimistic. Then I came around a bend, and traffic stopped cold. Turns out some unlucky bloke had gotten a flat tire in the middle of the 520 bridge. The city’s solution for this? Get a truck with hazard lights to drive behind it while the poor guy inches along at 3 MPH on a blown tire the remaining two miles to the next exit. Well played, city employees.

Forty traffic-congested, detour-infested, idiotic driver-saturated minutes later, I walked into Hooked very, very late. The aforementioned traffic gods are jerks.

NOTE: Obviously, this review is going to be a little incomplete. Having missed all of act one and the beginning of act two, I can really only speak to the technical aspects and the story as I understood it. But I do feel like the hour and a half I saw was pretty indicative of the film as a whole.

Hooked is about a group of young gamers in Russia. After winning a game tournament, they are awarded copies of a “brand new game”; something revolutionary. But when they fire it up, it’s not a game at all. All it does is give them awesome, video game-inspired powers. The guy who likes fighting games is now a bad ass street fighter. The first person shooters are now master marksmen and tacticians. The drivers…you get the idea. While experimenting with their new powers, they are noticed by various military groups, both private and governmental. Everyone wants their services, and most are willing to lie, steal, and cheat to get them. When they find out the creator of the game has 8000 more discs, and is planning to build his own private army, their loyalties and skills are tested in a race to stop global domination…and still get paid.

I sat down right as a large scale action scene was about to take place. The five main characters are loading paintball guns and preparing for a rescue operation to save their teammate. The very first thing I noticed was that the subtitles were horrible. Subtitles can be a tricky thing. They can be poorly worded, or awful literal translations. They can be misspelled, mistyped, out of sync, or too lightly colored to read. Granted, I’m sure the film in its native language is fine. But the subtitles for Hooked suffered from every single one of these problems. Subtitles for a male character would flash up as a female character started talking. Quick conversations rapidly devolved into a game of speed reading and pin the dialogue on the Ruskie. There was even a scene where it looked like one character’s dialog was English dubbed, then overdubbed with Russian, then subtitled. It was like listening to a multi-ethnic schizophrenic. Really confusing. The entire film was very white-washed, lots of neutral tones, which made even reading the subtitles a chore. You’d think in an action-laden film, this wouldn’t be a huge deal. But even when the bullets are flying, the characters are shouting out amazingly insightful things like, “let’s hide!” or “we have to help him!”

This first action sequence I witnessed also flirted dangerously with disaster. Employing a First Person Shooter style very similar to Doom, we see the heroes running around, gun out front, zeroing in on enemies and clumsily emptying CGI clips into their sternums. As horrible as it was, I will give them credit for only using it in this scene. Still, this is something we’ve seen before, and it’s never been ok.

Even without seeing act one, it was pretty easy to determine character archetypes. “Vampire” was the alpha male, the one put in charge of the team. His “by any means necessary, as long as it’s ethical” mentality showed through immediately. “Doc” was, from the start, the angry, sick of second banana friend who’s all about the paycheck and the thrill, but wants that number one spot. As light and flashy as most of the film is, Doc’s development is definitely a catalyst for upping the stakes and injecting deadly seriousness into an otherwise silly plotline. Rita is Vampire’s love interest, and the designated driver of the team. Max is the fighter, a quiet boy who objects to the violence and machismo escalating around him. Throw in an evil mastermind with a heart problem and a sympathetic handler we use as a moral reference point, and you have a complete circle of standard characters.

As much as I’d like to compare every Russian sci-fi action film to Night Watch, I can’t. They all fall short, and so did Hooked. Director Pavel Sanayev and cinematographer Vladislav Gurtchin definitely proved they can master an action sequence. Balancing fluid camera movements, inventive camera angles, and complicated shootouts is always tricky. These two, with the help of editor Dmitri Slobtsov, really succeeded in making every action sequence into its own contained operatic story. Unfortunately, there’s just too much of a good thing here. The film plays like a 132 minute action sequence that only injects character development and emotion when it’s taking a breath. The pacing is too fast for too long, and as an audience member, I was exhausted after two shootouts, and bored by the third.

One specific problem I had was the storyline of Max, the fighter who wants no part of the violence. Not only were his scenes few and far between, they were totally irrelevant. Bashfully asking a girl out, then picking a fight with her boyfriend, then ending up on a yacht and having a completely out of place sex scene really detracted from the overall story. Even in a chaotic film like this one, adding side plots that make no sense, spreading them so thin the audience doesn’t care, and then clumsily editing them into the already uneven flow of the film is just ill conceived.

I don’t know how studios work in Russia. I can barely understand their function in this country. But somewhere along the line, a group of passable actors and seemingly talented filmmakers were led astray with this project. Hooked sounded like a fun concept. I wasn’t expecting Bad Boys or Heat or The Matrix, but even low expectations sometimes can’t hold up against the inconceivable yet frequently inevitable paradox that - every now and then - a positive plus a positive plus a positive can still equal a negative.

Final Grade: C-

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