DarkGame
It’s a momentary victory for Portland detectives Benjamin Jacobs and Cathy Burnett which affirms why they do what they do, two abducted children found moments before they would have been murdered and safely returned to their family, but there is always another missing persons case which requires their expertise, all that is known the identities of some of the victims and where they were last seen before they found unwanted internet fame.
A game of Russian Roulette streaming on the dark web, the routing shifting constantly to make it apparently untraceable by conventional means, the masked host forces his hostages to play and even the winners are not safe, thousands of anonymous viewers bidding on the next challenge and what instrument will be used on them, chainsaws or liquid drain cleaner, or simply a good old-fashioned hanging…
Directed by The Ledge’s Howard J Ford from a script credited to three writers, Tom George, Gary Grant and Niall Johnson, DarkGame is a thriller composed so completely of tired tropes and familiar reversals it passes the realm of clichés to become the dramatic equivalent of mechanically recovered meat, scraped of the warehouse floor and compressed into a predictably unpleasant shape.
Starring Me You Madness’ Ed Westwick as Jacobs, he must outwit the sick host of the twisted show (Andrew P Stephen), partially masked so as to inadequately obscure his identity, before recently abducted Russian immigrant Katia Volkova (Natalya Tsetkova) is sacrificed for a surge in ratings; his own one-intern IT department unable to help, Jacobs must bargain with gleefully anti-social incarcerated cybercriminal Ray Larch (Rick Yale) to hack the system.
Larch’s expertise so indispensable the character is simply forgotten half way through the film, DarkGame plays like an entire season of Criminal Minds regurgitated by an AI generator which misses the point that it is the characters which draw an audience to any police procedural, Jacob’s pregnant wife serving only to demonstrate that he has an existence beyond his duty yet apparently oblivious to what he does, questioning him rather than running for safety as he asks when an unsolicited package arrives at their house.
The montages of concerned people looking at computer screens punctuated by jurisdictional squabbles with a senior FBI agent who communicates only by shouting, the plot parallels that of The Ringmaster and matches it for general unpleasantness, the parade of nastiness and contagious stupidity epitomised when Jacobs delays calling for backup lest he be mistaken about the location of the broadcast even after gunshots are heard, DarkGame an unwanted reminder of the unpleasant horror genre of torture porn which should have remained forgotten.
DarkGame will be available on digital download from Monday 21st October
