‘Games’: A Twisty Christmas

“Reindeer Games” is genre all the way, a standard brand updated with the requisite modern touches. Its twisty film noir world of down-on-their-luck men and unfathomable women is vintage B-picture material, but, in the grand B tradition, the games it plays are more ambitious than successful.

For though dazzling B’s like 1945’s “Detour” are justly idolized, it’s often forgotten that many of those low-budget second-rung films featured a capable director trying to make the best of miscast stars and not the most plausible of scripts. Which, decades later, is still more or less the case.

“To tell you the truth, I’ve never been much for the holidays,” Rudy Duncan (Ben Affleck) says in classic wised-up voice-over to begin things as director John Frankenheimer has his camera linger over shots of dead men in Santa suits. Immediately we flash back six days to upper Michigan’s bleak Iron Mountain prison, the kind of unfriendly place that specializes in cafeteria riots, sadistic guards and psychos unwisely let loose from solitary confinement.

Rudy, in for grand theft auto, and his best prison pal and cellmate Nick (British actor James Frain) are just three days shy of a Christmastime release and talking over what they’ll do with their first taste of freedom. Rudy says a mug of hot chocolate is all he’s after, but Nick has something more romantic in mind.

For Nick has been corresponding with Ashley (Charlize Theron), an attractive pen pal he met while behind bars. Her pictures fill the space above his bed and thoughts of her dance like sugarplums in his head. “I’m going to walk right into a relationship,” he says, content.

But movies being movies, events conspire in such a way that Rudy walks out of the joint alone. He sees Ashley, and she’s such a hot ticket that he does what men always do: He lies and tells her that he in fact is the Nick she’s been waiting for.

After engaging in one of those frenzied, acrobatic sexual bouts that have become standard big-screen fare, Rudy’s guilt about the deception pretty much disappears. But then he meets Gabriel (Gary Sinise), Ashley’s long-haired sadistic lunkhead of a brother who is called, not without reason, Monster.

Gabriel and his equally thuggish crew have their own reasons for being happy to see the man they think is Nick. For the real Nick, gleefully addressed as “Convict,” once worked security on a Native American-owned gambling establishment called the Tomahawk Casino. Gabriel and friends are counting on Nick’s expertise to get them inside the vault, and they don’t particularly care how they access it.

If this sounds complicated, it is the merest beginning to a baroque plot devised by Ehren Kruger, whose debut film was the similarly convoluted “Arlington Road.” Kruger has a gift for this kind of thing, but also a tendency to so pile surprise on surprise that succeeding revelations run the risk of deadening audiences as much as exciting them.

Also problematical is the film’s star casting, starting with Affleck as the tough, resourceful ex-con Rudy. Though the actor is excellent as a suit-wearing shady character in the current “Boiler Room,” it’s difficult to buy him as the kind of hard-boiled amoral type he’s supposed to be here. No amount of wicked tattoos or prison-built muscles can make Affleck look like anything but the prep school version of Robert De Niro’s Max Cady in Martin Scorsese’s “Cape Fear.”

Similarly out of place is Theron as the woman in Rudy’s life. Though her performance in “The Cider House Rules” was lovely, the actress seems to have been placed in a role she isn’t suited for simply because, like Affleck, she’s a current hot commodity that moviegoers are presumably interested in seeing.

Though “Reindeer Games” is not as compelling as “Ronin,” the veteran Frankenheimer’s last outing, the director does a brisk, no-nonsense job here, bringing his usual visual energy and professionalism to the table. He knows the difference between the things he can control and those he can’t, like the way the film’s wealth of Christmas music (“Games” was originally scheduled for December) feels out of place in a February release. Here’s hoping the former outweighs the latter next time around.

* MPAA rating: R, for strong violence, language and sexuality. Times guidelines: an extremely violent robbery and some brief but frenzied sexual activity.

‘Reindeer Games’

Ben Affleck: Rudy

Gary Sinise: Gabriel

Charlize Theron: Ashley

Dennis Farina: Jack Bangs

James Frain: Nick

Clarence Williams III: Merlin

A Marty Katz production, released by Dimension Films. Director John Frankenheimer. Producers Marty Katz, Bob Weinstein, Chris Moore. Executive producers Harvey Weinstein, Cary Granat, Andrew Rona. Screenplay Ehren Kruger. Cinematographer Alan Caso. Editors Tony Gibbs, Michael Kahn. Costumes May Routh. Music Alan Silvestri. Production design Barbara Dunphy. Art director Helen Jarvis. Set decorator Elizabeth Wilcox. Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes.

In general release.