Just out of prison, Affleck's Rudy improvises a half-baked scheme to pass himself off as his former cell mate, Nick (James Frain). It's all so that Rudy can hook up with Ashley (Charlize Theron), the adoring cutie who had become involved with Nick through a series of lonely hearts prison letters. (The two never actually met.) Rudy has little trouble -- and, apparently, no scruples -- assuming the identity of his convict buddy, who disappears from the film early on after being critically stabbed. There's a hitch, though -- a greasy-haired petty crook named Gabriel (Sinise), who has used Ashley's letters to lure Nick into helping him rob a casino.
Nick, who used to work at the casino, is supposed to know its layout, the location of the secret safe, and so on. But Rudy doesn't know any of this. Are his attempts at deception clever? Funny? Suspenseful? Actually, none of the above; the characters see through him nearly as quickly as the audience does. Gabriel, however, in an act of ''stupido'' convenience, keeps convincing himself that Rudy ''is'' Nick. Sure, he needs the guy for his robbery, but, more than that, ''Reindeer Games'' needs to sustain its gapingly slipshod identity charade. Otherwise there'd be no movie.
That's a shame, too, since Affleck has just what it takes to play a nice-guy con artist. He's ingenuous, even baby-faced, but he gathers force as an actor when he has to steamroll someone or talk his way out of a jam. Unfortunately, the script, by Ehren Kruger (''Arlington Road,'' ''Scream 3''), offers the star little in the way of fast and loose verbal play. Sinise hams tastefully, though his rabid small-time scoundrel comes off as more mingy than menacing, and Theron wears her character's shifting sympathies about as rotely as she does her orange dye job.
The performance that really should have counted was Frankenheimer's. He keeps this joyless machine moving, but most of the time he seems stranded between eras, investing ''conviction'' in a movie that was never meant to be more than a glib quasi-parody. Where's Simon West or Michael Bay when you need them? In ''Reindeer Games,'' Frankenheimer is a craftsman trying to do a hack's job.
Add your comment
The rules: Keep it clean, and stay on the subject or we might delete your comment. If you see inappropriate language, e-mail us. An asterisk * indicates a required field.