Just in case you were wondering, it isn’t just Die Hard and various Shane Black thrillers that are the only actioners to take place at Christmas. In fact, in 2000, John Frankenheimer, the legendary director behind The Manchurian Candidate and French Connection II, took aim at the festive season with Reindeer Games, a cynical thriller that sees a case of mistaken identity spiral out of control when a newly released con finds himself roped in to supply info for a casino robbery he has no idea about.
Prepped as a starring vehicle for Ben Affleck, sizably pared down by the editors at Miramax and even renamed in some countries as the thoroughly derivative “Deception”, Reindeer Games had something of a rough ride of it; but that’s nothing a director’s cut, a seasonal rewatch and some Christmas cheer can’t handle. Does the virtually forgotten, twist laden thriller finally stand the test of time – or does Reindeer Games ultimately still finds a lump of coal in it’s stocking?
Cellmates and best buddies, Nick Cassidy and Rudy Duncan, are only two days from release from the prison located near Iron Mountain, Michigan and Nick in particular can’t wait to get out and meet up with a young woman named Ashley Mercer. Even though they’ve never met, the two have fallen in love entirely through correspondence via letter, and Ashley has pledged to meet him on release day where they’ll undoubtedly either live happily ever after, or at least have a weekend of hot sex. However, putting a major raincheck on this is when another prisoner, looking to settle a score with Rudy, ends up fatally stabbing Nick to death during a prison riot, leaving Rudy to be released on his own.
Spying a unsuspecting Ashley waiting for her dead lover at the release gates and recognising her from her photos, the very lonely Rudy bites the bullet and does a very foolish thing – he hops off the prison bus and pretends to be Nick. But while he gets the majority of that weekend of hot sex I mentioned, he also gets a heaping dollop of karma too when his act of subterfuge comes with dire consequences.
They arrive in the form of Ashley’s brother, Gabriel, who knows from Nick letters that he used to be a security guard in a casino that he and his motley gang hope to rob at gun point. The plan is to get Nick to walk them through the floor plan so they know exactly where to go to grab as much cash as possible, but of course, Rudy isn’t Nick and has no idea how to guide these desperate and violent criminals in their endeavour. But what can he do? He tries to come clean, but no one – not even Ashley – seems to believe him; so he has to fake his way through proceedings as best he can and hope he doesn’t catch a bullet for his troubles.
However, while Rudy assumes that he’s pulling the biggest deception, it turns out that plenty of other things involving this heist aren’t exactly what they seem either. It’s going to be a wild Christmas.
So, if memory serves, the theatrical cut of Reindeer Games felt like a rushed grab bag of scattered clichés, garbled plots and Ben Affleck alternating between screaming in panic and acting typically cocky, but with an extra twenty (!) minutes added back into the film in its director’s cut, John Frankenheimer’s final movie starts to make a lot more sense. I mean, it’s still flawed, sure – but it’s not The Island Of Doctor Moreau flawed, that’s for sure, even though it doesn’t contain a tribe of mouse monsters… Anyway, with a whopping amount of footage restored back in 2001, Reindeer Games certainly has more time to breathe and let it’s tense comedy of errors play out more naturally. Does this mean that the earlier parts of the film take a lot longer to get going? Absolutely, but at least some of the more outlandish decisions made by the characters start to make a little more sense when you take in the big picture.
Simply put, in almost a complete flip of the premise of his last film, Ronin, where we witness a gang of cold, professional, mercenaries do their job with steely-eyed precision, Frankenheimer here offers up a ragged selection of chancers, losers and fuck-ups, desperately trying to grasp at that big score without actually having the know-how or talent to pull it off. It’s essentially the anti-Ocean’s Eleven that starts with a terrible plan to rob some money that progressively gets worse because no one realises that they’ve kidnapped the wrong guy to pump for information. However, while this sounds like a premise that’s come straight out of the 70s, there’s a few issues that tend to mar the experience. The first is something of a rather odd pace that isn’t quite fixed by the director’s cut as while the theatrical version whipped by so fast, the movie seemed far dumber by comparison, the add character stuff tends to make parts of the film drag when it should be ramping up.
Another sizable issue is with two members of the main cast. The first is that Affleck’s Rudy suffers greatly from the actor being in the midst of his infamous smug phase, which may explain why he’s happy to catfish and bang the girlfriend of his recently stabbed friend, but doesn’t really help when we’re supposed to be scared for him or even remotely care for his wellbeing. Elsewhere, we also find Charlize Theron in something of a thankless role as Ashley; now, without giving out one of the many increasingly outlandish twists that pepper the climax like stray gunfire, for most of the film she comes across as a naive, devoted girlfriend who screams alot. But while her character shows some hidden sides later on, it means that the actress who went on to rife the Fury Road isn’t much more than annoying eye candy that genuinely seems incredibly beneath her.
Thank God then for the supporting cast and a final reel that drops all the build up like a bad habit and starts unloading on you with gunfights, plot twists and reveals that teeter on borders of ludicrous-ville. Playing the chief heavy, Gabriel, is a sneering Gary Sinise in what looks like a Gene Simmons wig and you can tell he’s having a ball pumping his shotgun in the middle of conversations to prove a point and torturing Affleck by throwing darts into his screaming body. He’s backed up by his gang that’s made up of Clarence Williams III as the violent, volatile one, Danny Trejo as the thoughtful one and Donal Logue as the sarcastic one – and as an added bonus, we even get Dennis Farina as the overstressed boss of the targeted casino who also throws a few choice spanners into the works. However, it all eventually comes put in the wash with a lively, if slightly stagey, final third that sprays twists around almost as liberally as the large quantity that bullets that whizz past you during the enjoyable climax.
While Frankenheimer shows that he still knows his way around a shootout, you can’t help but wonder if the Ehren Krueger’s script could have done with either a lot more Shane Black style jokes, or no jokes entirely to really nail that gritty, 70s aesthetic. Similarly, while Affleck was starting his inexorable slide toward Gigli in 2003 and Theron had far better action thrillers lined up in her future, Reindeer Games may be fun, but it has just as many losers as it does winners.
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