There are movies that make you miss Mystery Science Theater 3000 acutely, and this one of them. Surviving the Game, a thoroughly absurd action flick that thinks it has some sort of social conscience, badly needs a what-the-heck-were-they-thinking smack upside the head to humble it.
Ice-T plays a belligerent homeless man, living on the streets of an unnamed city, who has the bad luck to fall in with a group of game hunters who are looking to hire a guide for their next trip into the remotest mountains. Why these men — led by the phoning-it-in creepy Rutger Hauer — would wish to hire a street-smart, outdoorsy-dumb guy with no hunting or guiding or mountaineering experience is something that only briefly concerns Ice-T. But then, he also has the bad luck not to have seen the opening sequence of the film to which we are treated, in which another ragged-looking and therefore presumed street person is being hunted to the ground in a remotest-mountain locale.
Yes, it’s the ol’ homeless-men-as-prey-for-gun-happy-rich-schmucks scenario, and the thing of it is, without any sense of suspense or mystery — which is conveniently removed for us by the aforementioned opening sequence — the entire first half of the film is basically pointless. We know what Ice-T is in for, the poor dope, but he doesn’t, and we don’t enough about him to worry for him in his cluelessness. We don’t care about him at all, in fact, except as the butt of unintentional hilarity. After he gets an advance from Hauer on his, er, mountain-guide fee, he retires to the most elegant hotel he can afford on these new not-quite riches, which is a buck-98-a-night roach motel, where the director, Ernest R. Dickerson, treats us to a parody of the let’s-get-sexy-in-the-hotel-room cliché. We get to observe while Ice-T takes a bath in a grungy, disgusting bathroom, and by the time the film finally gets to the mountains, you’re wishing it was Ernest R. Dickerson who gets to play the pig in the poke.
There’s much discussion among the hunters about the uselessness of people like Ice-T and the vital necessity of hunting them down and killing them, after which Ice-T kicks all their butts to kingdom come, which is what passes for commentary on tough social issues. But kudos to the flick for including Charles S. Dutton among the hunters — who also include Gary Busey, whom you just knew would be here, and F. Murray Abraham — making it merely classist instead of actually racist.
This review originally appeared at the now-defunct Apollo Guide.
