Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

People, I’ve seen some movies with some crazy ass twisty ass endings but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything along the lines of this little fist fight of a Straight to DVD beat down movie ‘Game Over’. This one was something else.

Andre ‘Chyna’ McCoy, who has obviously done a crunch or two in his day, assumes the role of ex-con Victor Knox. Before he went in the joint Victor was a boxer with a lot of promise and a devastating left hook until he had a run in with an unscrupulous promoter which landed Victor pulling a dime. Now back in the world Victor is finding the sledding difficult at best. No one will hire him because he’s an ex-con, since he can’t find a job his unfriendly and crooked to bone P.O Hanisek (Paul Green) stays on his ass constantly, and his old girlfriend Lyse (Heidi Marie Wansler) won’t allow Victor to see his young son Trace. In fact Trace doesn’t even know that Victor exists.

Nearing the end of his rope Victor confides in his boy Stone (Ron Ware), his former trainer down at the gym who hips him to an opportunity. Seems that there is a little Bloodsport type street fighting competition going on run by some cat who pushes luxury cars named Mr. Acton (Joel King), with the winner of this battle taking away a cool hundred grand. Though he’s skeptical at first, Victor soon realizes that he has few options, joins in the fray and then gets stamped an ugly tattoo which makes him a member of this underground street fighting crew.

The thing is that these fights don’t take place in a ring. No sir, they can take place anywhere at anytime as Victor soon learns as his first fight is against some gangly looking business man who gets beat down and has his arm broken for his trouble. After the fight the mysterious Ref (Daz Crawford) appears out of thin air to raise Victor’s hand in victory and pass him some loot for the hard earned ass kicking he just delivered. Another perk of winning these fights is that our man Mr. Acton

delivers the occasional ring girl or two the home of the winner which has to be some super incentive to continue winning these fights. Also Victor has managed to find a regular gig driving around some pretty young woman named Violet (Latrice Harper), though I’m thinking it’s just an Audi and Miss Violet could probably drive the car her own damn self. We are a bit curious about Miss Violet and what she does for a living in that she needs a personal driver, has a fresh crib and doesn’t seem to have any kind of regular job, but all will be answered in due time.

From Kung Fu tailors to racist brothers to a hostile Cirque du Soleil style acrobatic crew, Victor takes on all comers and more only to find himself getting further away from his soul and his plan to get his son back. He even finds himself wanting to quit as he has tired of the violence, but the only way to quit the game is to win the game… or die trying. Until we get our SHOCKING CONCLUSION!

Directed by Peter Sullivan, ‘Game Over’ is obviously a low budget action movie but that doesn’t keep it from being entertaining. This is second movie I’ve seen lead Andre McCoy in, with the first being his hasty but memorable appearance in the movie ‘Doomed’ and the dude is a pretty good actor. I gotta admit though that it seems as if Sullivan got most of his cast from the local L.A. gyms as opposed to the local acting schools, not because the actors in this film were bad because most of them were passably decent, but because the total body fat of all the characters in this movie was about a combined 6.5%. There were some super fit dudes and chicks in this flick. My self confidence went down three notches after watching this movie. Since this was a fight flick there were plenty of fight scenes and Sullivan, working with the fight director Declan Mulvey does a decent job shooting the fight scenes. They’re not quite Wu Ping Yeun quality or anything like that as some of the moves during a few of the fight scenes had a staged quality to them, but for the most part, especially considering the budget, they were pretty good.

Then came time for the movie to resolve itself, and I would have been more than happy with the resolution being Victor fighting whomever to take home the big prize but ‘Game Over’ had a much grander plan. ‘Game Over’ as it turns out had a ‘message’ and considering how this ‘message’ was executed I could have really done without it. I mean a movie that consists of street fights viewed by multiple unseen cameras and a materializing referee is pretty silly to begin with but the final act was so out there that it almost has to be seen to be believed, and because it has to be seen I would be remiss if I gave it away, though that really hasn’t stopped me from doing this before.

Regardless, ‘Game Over’ was still a reasonably entertaining low-budget fight flick with lots of fight scenes and a good performance from lead Andre McCoy, and despite the completely wacky ending, it was still more than worth watching.

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