“Stay Alive” (Hollywood Pictures)
It Will Bore You To Death
Video games are certainly hot these days so a movie about a deadly video game should be a killer film, right Wrong! This movie is deadly all right – deadly dull. If you are unfortunate enough to stumble into a theater where it is showing it will bore you to death. So stay alive, and stay home.
The plot concerns a video game that is received by a young man (Milo Ventimiglia). While he is playing it he discovers two of his friends are dead. Then he dies in the same way as his on screen persona. It seems the video can actually kill the players.
Of course the video falls into the hands of another group of players which includes Hutch (Jon Foster), Abigail (Samaire Armstrong), Swink (Frankie Muniz), October (Sofia Bush), Phineus (Jimmi Simpson) and Miller (Adam Goldberg). It takes a while, and a few deaths, to convince the group they are in danger of extermination because they played the game.
So now these kids have to play the game and “stay alive” until they can figure out how to solve the mystery and destroy the evil emanating from the game. This is done in a battle at a creepy mansion in New Orleans and a tower at the back of the house. It looks hokey, it sounds hokey and it is hokey.
The actors in the movie are all bad, but in fairness to them the script is worse. They have no back story; the plot makes no sense; and the evil just seems to be there with no rhyme or reason. Frankie Muniz seems to be testing the waters for a career in movies after “Malcolm in the Middle.” Based on this performance things are not looking bright for Mr. M.
All of the other actors seem to have come straight from the WB school of charm. They pose more than act, and they emote with difficulty. No one in the cast is a standout and that is not ensemble acting, it is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
The film is rated PG-13 for profanity and violence. This rating also insures that the horror that is needed for this “horror” movie is nowhere to be seen.
There will always be an audience for this “teens in distress” type of movie, but let’s hope audiences opt for something a little better than this. “Stay Alive” is a mess that even the modest violence can’t make interesting.
I scored “Stay Alive” a deadly 3 out of 10.
