It’s the future, and “Slayers” is all the rage in the newly released “Gamer.” “Slayers” is a multiplayer reality game featuring death row inmates mind-controlled by players in the outside world. The rule is simple: Kill or be killed. Any inmate who wins 30 matches regains his freedom. So when an online champion, Kable (Gerard Butler), racks up 27 wins, the media mogul (Michael C. Hall) controlling the alternate universe gets nervous and plots to have Kable killed.Also injected into the plot is a side story about Kable’s wife (Amber Valletta) and daughter. The wife, who is out of cash with the bread winner being away, decides to pimp her mind to a human specimen reminiscent of those tubs of lard in Wall-E. Meanwhile, all attempts to visit her daughter, who has been adopted by faceless parents, prove fruitless. These extraneous details of his past life don’t sketch out Kable, as much as paint him with impasto.”Gamer” uses its shaky camera and canted angles to good effect in the opening scene. We see Kable as he obliterates the competition — blasting heads off with cannons, felling snipers with automatic rifles, mowing down the competition with machine-gun fire. The battle sequences are shot in a dusty, grayish monochrome that vividly simulates the fog of war. Like the inmates yearning to break free, “Gamer” appears to be a stimulating film pleading to escape from straitjacket of the filmmaker’s limited vision. It does feature some apt social commentary on how the media and the corporations behind them control society. There is a scene where the mogul has an interview on a news show. Immediately after the interview, we see an ad for his company run. The film also has some hints of “Idiocracy” — stupidity promoted as virtue — and the “Matrix,” with slight forays into questions of who we are and what the visible world is. A sequence featuring Hall reminds one of Fred Astaire’s dancing “Bojangles of Harlem” in “Swing Time” and floors Frank Miller’s pathetic Nazi-themed pastiche in “The Spirit.”Unfortunately, one cannot get away from the feeling that the directors are in love with the brutality and raunchiness they display on-screen. We are terrorized by Valleta’s derrière and held hostage to their insensitivity to death that borders on the callous and barbaric. “Gamer” should rightfully be denounced for its ugliness and violence — a New York Times reviewer said the film was “a futuristic vomitorium of bosoms and bullets,” but as a cultural phenomenon, it shouldn’t be ignored. We do not always look into the mirror to see how pretty we are — sometimes it reminds us our make-up isn’t on smoothly.While certain people believe the world would be a better place without games, the cyber-demographic is an extremely influential one. Halo 3 registered $170 million in retail sales in its first 24 hours, according to the Los Angeles Times. That is $20 million more than the similar record for films. Those kind of numbers cannot be dismissed out of hand, even if you’re Bill Gates. Indeed, games are encroaching into other forms of entertainment: Several generations ago, people were introduced to the Beatles on TV (the Ed Sullivan Show) and through film (“A Hard Day’s Night”); in our time we’ll get a fresh peek at the Fab Four through Rock Band. What does that say about us?One can deplore the filmmakers and their product, but it is the world we live in. “Gamer” is a film that need not be watched to be seen. There will be a queue around the block when the next edition of Halo comes out.Freke Ette is a political theory graduate student from Uyo, Nigeria. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_fette.– – – -Contact Freke Ette at [email protected]