
Kino Lorber
Reindeer Games is best remembered as the final feature film from legendary director John Frankenheimer (Seconds, The Manchurian Candidate). Frankenheimer was an iconic director of thrillers, but unfortunately Reindeer Games wastes a strong first act and strong direction with a ridiculous story and an utterly bored central performance from star Ben Affleck.
Ben Affleck stars as Rudy Duncan, a convict in Michigan State Prison who, along with his cellmate Nick Cassidy (James Frain), is due for release in two days.
When Cassidy is apparently killed in a prison riot the day before release Duncan decides to meet up with Cassidy’s romantic pen pal Ashley Mercer (Charlize Theron) and pass himself off as her beau.
As Duncan begins to feel guilty for taking advantage of Mercer, the two are kidnapped by her gangster brother Gabriel (Gary Sinise, who is actually firing on all cylinders) and his henchmen.
Gabriel used Ashley to lure Nick in to use as a point man on a robbery of the Indian casino he used to work for and Duncan is forced to take his place in the scheme. All of this builds to a showdown with casino manager Jack (Dennis Farina), and one of the most ludicrous twist endings in thriller history.
I typically do not single out actors in this space but it is impossible not to point out how Ben Affleck torpedoes this film with his central performance. He seems confused, sluggish, and not at all engaged with the material. The cast is stacked, but not everyone’s doing their best work here– but in a winding, Tarantino-style, crime thriller you really need a smart lead performance to keep the audience grounded.
Affleck’s Rudy Duncan is clearly intended to evoke a Hitchcockian hero: an ordinary man who is drawn into deadly danger by an understandable immoral shortcut, he’s just not plugged into the film at all.
Theron has the opposite problem: she’s game enough for the work, especially in the Director’s Cut which greatly expands the wild sex scene the film is primarily remembered for, but the script so radically shifts her character from naive ingénue to duplicitous femme fatale and back that there’s no way for even a talented actress to get settled and work out what kind of human would behave in this way.
The rural Michigan setting strongly evokes the work of legendary crime writer Elmore Leonard, who set much of his work in and around Detroit. Unfortunately the magic of Leonard’s writing is in the specificity of his dialogue and that’s not present here, so what you’re left with is snow-dressed Upper Midwestern Rust Belt grey, with nothing interesting to look at.
Frankenheimer was coming off of one of his very best films: the French co-production Ronin and this feels like a scaled back, American crime version of that film: stacked cast, genre archetypes subverted, all building to a bittersweet ending.
The difference is that Ronin got an uncredited page one rewrite from David Mamet, and Reindeer Games feels like a first draft. What action there is is confidently staged and edited but when it’s in service of a plot you can’t believe and performed by a cast that doesn’t seem to know what’s going on– you start to check out.
Extras include audio commentary, featurette and trailer.
Unfortunately Reindeer Games is not worth another look unless you have a strong camp sensibility or just desperately want any kind of thriller.
Not Recommended.


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