LET THE GAME BEGIN (a review)

LET THE GAME BEGIN (a review)

This movie was written and directed by Amit Gupta, the first movie he has written or directed. It stars Thomas Ian Nicholas (from the original American Pie movies) as Tripp and featuring Michael Madsen, Natasha Henstridge, Stephen Baldwin, Diora Baird, which is about as weird of a grouping as any movie I could imagine. First movies -- especially writer/director first movies -- are always...um...interesting. So let's get to it.

The story: Tripp is an ordinary schmuck of a married man with a good business idea. He partners up with a couple people to try to sell his idea, but he can't get any investors interested. Then, when talking to his friend who knows how to pick up women, Tripp realizes that getting investors is like picking up women and if he learned to pick up women he could apply that to his business and get investors. But when he finally gets investors and builds the business, his marriage falls apart and he has to try more tricks to keep his wife from getting everything.

Yikes. This really is two totally different movies. The first half has a nice premise -- the parallel of getting people to go into business with you (investors), like trying to pick up girls at a bar. And for the most part that plays out okay. A little too predictable and a little too one sided (once he starts learning to pick up girls, we stay on that for a long time, so you don't see the progression of his trying to sell. But then you hit the middle of the film and everything flips around, but in a way that makes no sense. Almost out of the blue Tripp wants to divorce his wife, which is weirder since she just had his child. But then she wants to divorce him first and the rest of the movie is about who is having an affair and child support or custody or something. I don't know. By that point everything was floundering. Movies stay focused by keeping clear two things -- what does the protagonist want and why can't he get it. The first half we know what he wants -- to get investors. In the second half...I don't know. He wants a divorce, but she wants a divorce too so that isn't a problem. He wants to sell the company, but that isn't a problem. He wants partial custody of the child, but there's nothing about what fatherhood means to him. Certainly it didn't mean enough to try to work things out with his ex-. There's something about him or his wife having an affair, but so what? I guess the idea is that if he were having an affair he would lose everything or be denied partial custody of his child, but where the hell is that true? Certainly not in California.

So while there is a decent idea in here, and the first half is okay, the whole thing falls apart after midpoint when the story takes a huge turn and then just wanders in a way that didn't make sense to me at all. If the second half had been cohesive I couldn't at least given it a partial recommend, especially for people that like SWINGERS or WEDDING SINGER (although even the first half isn't really in the same league as them), but with that second half...yikes.

*** PASS ****