The
contestants of this futuristic survival game wake up with amnesia, so maybe
they will not remember the similarities their situation bears to The Running Man, The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, Turkey Shoot, The 10th Victim, Death Race 2000 and every
other blood sport contest to come down the dystopian pike. We remember though—and
the comparisons are not flattering. Nonetheless, Alec Baldwin will serve up
some lethal mayhem for the passive proles in Francesco Cinquemani’s Andron (trailer here), which opens
tomorrow in New York.
It
is time to play the Redemption Games or Andron or the Black Labyrinth or
whatever this population-controlling, false hope-instilling contest is called.
Just like Highlander, there can be only one, but the contestants do not know it
yet. They have woken up in what looks like the abandoned factory from Rob
Zombie’s 31, confused yet instinctively
wary of each other. However, Anita regains her memories quicker than most. She
was once one of the key programmers of the Redemption Game, who uploaded a counter-acting
nano-virus into her blood stream. The rest of her colleagues are slaves, who
volunteered to play the game in hopes of winning their freedom, as well as the
freedom of other slaves who are betting on them. Of course, the stakes are life
and death for everyone with skin in the game.
Baldwin
is the snotty Big Brother presiding over (and fixing) the game, at the behest
of the President, played by a zoned out Danny Glover on auto-pilot. At least Andron gives Baldwin some game show
experience before commencing his host duties on the rebooted Match Game. Presumably, people really
will win on the network game show relaunch, but it is a different story in the
Black Labyrinth. To make matters worse, the first player to die is the most
attractive, so just try to explain what Cinquemani was thinking with that one.
Although
Baldwin can be a terrific villain (Glengarry
Glen Ross, Malice, The Cooler) he totally phones it in just as much as
Glover. Skunk Anansie lead singer Deborah Dyer, a.k.a. Skin has some presence
as Anita and Korlan Madi’s quick exit is rather disappointing, but the rest of
the dozen or so players mostly just wash together.
