I wasn’t expecting Spartacus watching Gamer, but at least give me Death Race 2000. This loud, rude, crude and insipient ode to video gaming gone awry is little more than a cooler than thou schlocksterpiece that has an interesting premise, but does nothing with it; it’s like someone wanted to make Rocky but ended up making Mortal Kombat. Like so many movies before it, Gamer squanders a cast of perfectly good actors for scene after scene of mindless killings and dismemberments. About the only thing you’re guaranteed to get out of it is nausea, but that’s probably only if you’re a generation that grew up 16-bit video games or less.

But sensory overload can’t make up for lazy screenwriting, over-the-top direction and clichéd character development. In an era when urban warfare kills thousands in far flung lands, when even the non-interactive type of reality show creates monsters with regularity, is it necessary to glorify it? Like I said though, I don’t think that was the intent, at least I hope not. Clearly the filmmaking duo of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (Crank) probably thought they were working on a Blade Runner level of social commentary and outside the box filmmaking. If they had any interest though in creating something raw and real they wouldn’t have stuffed Gamer with enough titillation to overload the average Maxim reader.

What little of the plot that isn’t borrowed from Death Race is borrowed from Gladiator. A mighty warrior and skilful soldier (Gerard Butler) seeks revenge against an emperor (Michael C. Hall) that exiled him and took his family from him by fighting his way through a series of gladiatorial games. But this isn’t the Roman Coliseum, but a virtual environment where death row inmates are pitted against each other, controlled remotely by decedent and bored teenagers like young Simon (Logan Lerman). If you get 30 wins in a row, the inmate goes free and his controller reveals in being a champion with all the British jailbait they can stand.

Butler’s Kable has the most wins ever and stands just a few rounds away from freedom and a reunion with his wife and child, or so he thinks. Naturally since this is a dystopian future, there’s an underground movement that wants to overthrow the established order and let freedom ring. Cool, I’d buy that. Heck, I’d even join if I lived in the world of this movie. But remember what Grouch Marx said about not belonging to any organization that would have him as a member. I have to say that I wouldn’t belong to any underground society rocking activist group that couldn’t think up a more imaginative name than The Humanz. The zed does not make it cool, and if our only hope for salvation is the stirring oratory of Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, panic.

Plus, there’s something disturbing in the way this world is so passive. Members of (ugh) The Humanz refer to this ground swell of support amongst the general public to reject a world where mind-controlling reality games reinforce class warfare, but where is it? That’s right, if I want well-thought political and social allegory than I really walked into the wrong theatre. This is movie about Gerard Butler kicking ass and looking gruff, Michael C. Hall doing his best to prove that vaudeville and villainy still mix and Kyra Sedgwick wearing far too much eye make-up. And remember how adorably optimistic Logan Lehrman was in the short-lived Jack & Bobby or in playing the young Ashton Kutcher in The Butterfly Effect? Well now he’s a pissy little Judge Reinhold in Fast Times wannabe.

What do you get out of Gamer? Mindless violence dressed up like social commentary against the same? Check. Decent actors forced to say and do things that are even beneath the cast members of either the 90210 or Melrose Place remakes on The CW network? Check. Lazy direction that relies more on squibs and things going boom then it does on things being said and understood? Check. And if I could go the rest of life without seeming a 400 pound, greasy, naked Asian man getting sexually aroused by having his real life female avatar engage in acts of wanted sexual perversion with leather daddy Milo Ventimiglia, I’ll die very, very happy.