Perhaps I am dating myself, but one of my favorite movies when I was younger was 1983’s WarGames. In fact, I even read the novelization that came out before the movie was released because I was so excited to find out what was going to happen in the film. It might seem ancient in terms of technology by today’s standards, but the movie had some cutting edge concepts for its time. Sure, it was hokey and barely plausible, but it was fun and entertaining. Most importantly, it didn’t insult the audience’s intelligence. So, I was surprised and saddened when I heard there was a sequel. A direct-to-video sequel. That’s usually the mark of an inferior film with little or no connection to the original source material.
WarGames: The Dead Code takes the premise of the 1983 film – a sentient government computer gains access to the U. S. nuclear arsenal and nearly starts World War III — and updates it for the post-9/11 world. This time around a sentient government computer, named R.I.P.L.E.Y., is used to root out terrorists by offering up a web-based game for them to play. If the player can defeat a level of the game called The Dead Code, they’re basically marked for investigation and, presumably, destroyed. I wasn’t aware that terrorists were suckers for web-based video games but, according to this script’s logic, they are.
When young computer geek Will Farmer (Matt Lanter) stumbles onto the web site, he plays the game and easily defeats the computer’s challenge. Due to a gaping plot hole that never gets resolved, Will reroutes some of his next-door neighbor’s bank account funds into a wager on the game. This neighbor is apparently tied into a real terrorist organization. I say “apparently” because we never find out for sure where or how that minor plot point winds up. Will is marked as a “person of interest” by R.I.P.L.E.Y., who then manages to spy on his every move by tapping into security cameras and tracking his cell phone.
I honestly can’t make much more sense of the plot from that point forward. But it goes something like this: Will travels to Montreal with the chess club to impress a girl (Amanda Walsh). Somehow, R.I.P.L.E.Y. ties Will’s mother — who is suffering from a sinus condition — into the entire fiasco because she works at a chemical plant. When Will tries to hack into the government’s computer to check on her medical condition, a bug is placed in his girlfriend’s cell phone. And, somehow, they run into Dr. Stephen Falken (Gary Reineke), who designed the computer from the first movie. Falken tries to help them because his computer was replaced by R.I.P.L.E.Y. Or something like that.
Honestly, I was confused during the entire movie. Many of the plot points are so arbitrary that I lost track of what was actually happening. Somehow, the computer was able to read people’s lips and actually attempted to kill one of the government agents who used it. I have no idea why. I didn’t care to understand and I’m not sure that if I’d have paid more attention that I’d even be able to understand what was going on.
When the movie asked me to believe that terrorists could be caught through the Internet by making them bet money on their video game skills, I turned off my brain and wondered what other ridiculous leaps of faith the movie would ask me to make. When R.I.P.L.E.Y. began watching people in their cars from multiple angles from one immobile video camera, I just let the stupidity wash over me as this train wreck of a movie barreled towards its inexplicable conclusion.
1.0 out of 5.0 stars
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