I have been trying to watch The Gamers: Hands of Fate since last Friday night, the soonest I possibly could. After all, I Kickstarted the thing (full disclosure) and I'm friends with one of the actors (fuller disclosure) and I've had drinks with some of the others (even fuller) and one of the backer updates flat out asked everyone to write reviews (fullest disclosure). I wanted to watch the stupid thing, and not even just so I could write about it.
Well, my review of the movie's web hosting, or perhaps my bandwidth, is that it sucked harder than a diamond vacuum cleaner. I got well acquainted with Vimeo's loading animation (I was not the only one who marathonned The Spinning Square Show last week) and, at length, the first 15 seconds of the movie. And the first 15 seconds are not that interesting the first time--I knew that before, since the opening was released as a sort of preview--but after a dozen times I got well and truly sick of hearing "Countermay: Where several threads converge in the tapestry of worlds."
At this point I became pessimistic. I loved the original The Gamers, a student film only marginally more coherent than Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The sequel, The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, was a relative disappointment for me, afflicted as it was with fits of taking itself seriously. It benefited from the addition of some actors who I enjoyed seeing live before (or in some cases, since), but on the whole I came away with the fear that the movie's larger budget had been its undoing. Given the chance to make a "real" movie, the Dead Gentlemen's reach had exceeded their grasp, and they had reached the wrong way. So about half the time I laughed as hard as I was supposed to, but the rest of the tie I found myself "giving it a chance" for the sake of the friends of a friend who had made it--which I know artists hate, and I hate to do. As a result, my memory of Dorkness Rising is perhaps unjustly negative.
Before I go any deeper into this I should probably throw a bone to those readers (Hi!) who don't know what The Gamers is. The first two movies focused on a tabletop gaming group. Half of each movie followed the players, and half followed the fantasy world of their game, with the players and their fantasy avatars played by the same actors. Most of the humor came from the familiar (to me, at least) travails of a game master trying to keep his carefully crafted and deadly serious story from descending into farce at the hands of the players.
That should be enough to go on, especially since Hands of Fate mostly jettisons tabletop roleplaying for a new hobby: collectible card games. This movie follows Cass (Brian Lewis), erstwhile antagonist of the previous movie, as he tries to win a card tournament. It's half sports movie in the style of The Karate Kid, and half Dances With Wolves with the card players playing the noble savages and Cass as their initially contemptuous but ultimately assimilated savior. (Neither of these derivations is lost on or un-remarked-upon by the film itself.) And of course, the third half is the fantasy plotline, now concerning the characters on the cards (with their own actors, somewhat disappointingly but appropriately) as their fates are repeatedly reshuffled.
Believe it or not, I think this might be the most widely accessible of the three Gamers movies. (I may not be the best one to judge this since I have a grounding in both RPGs and CCGs--I'll have to try it on my parents.) But even if it isn't that, I think it really is the best Gamers movie: the best written, the evenest in tone, the most interesting, the best acted, and the most consistently funny. It makes me glad, unlike its predecessor, that the Dead Gentlemen had come up with a larger budget than before--they seemed to know what to do with it.
So, for those of you who are waiting for the actual value judgment, thanks for staying with me. The Gamers: Hands of Fate is good. I realized that I never found myself "giving it a chance" like I did Dorkness Rising; I just enjoyed it on its own terms.
Watch it. If you want to watch it for free, hurry up and use the link at the top of this post, or look it up on Zombie Orpheus, or watch it on YouTube, before the end of the month.
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