Mark Reviews Movies: DANGEROUS GAME: THE LEGACY MURDERS

Dangerous Game: The Legacy Murders, Paramount Pictures/SP Media Group

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 20, 2022

Who needs one good idea when a movie can have about half a dozen undercooked ones? That's the case with Dangerous Game: The Legacy Murders, which changes its premise multiple times and in laughable ways. Only one purpose remains clear: to be cruel and violent toward as many of its characters as possible.

The first setup involves a family reunion at a mansion on a remote island. The patriarch of the Betts clan is Ellison (Jon Voight), who rose from poverty to become a billionaire. He's bitter about most things, especially his family. It's his birthday, though, so he invites them all to get together and celebrate—or argue. There's a lot of repetitive arguing before anything resembling a plot starts.

The rest of the family consists of Alec (Will Sasso), his wife Marie (Laura Mennell), the couple's daughter Livie (Megan Charpentier), and their son Cameron (Dylan Playfair), who has also brought along his girlfriend Tara (Kaya Coleman). Ellison's other son Kyle (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who took over the family business, arrives later with his fiancée Joy (Skyler Shaye). Things start going wrong when a cat dies a random, explosively bloody death in a garbage disposal for no reason, and not even the cast seems to have a clue as to how to react to such unnecessary bloodshed.

Before any of this, though, Brian Buccellato's screenplay cuts right to the mystery and death, as a woman wanders some hallways, discovers a room filled with information about a century-old killer, and suffocates in the trap of a makeshift gas chamber. A creepy, distorted voice is here, of course, to guide and scold characters about the game they're supposed to be playing and warn them about all the traps that are in store for them, so that's one of the familiar ideas here.

Another involves a literal game—a board game with the same name as the movie's title—that the disembodied voice wants the family to play. They have to look into a bunch of clues, using photos and autopsy reports, and solve a puzzle that holds the key to the mystery of the game. If there are rules or any kind of strategy to the game, they're irrelevant. It's a vacuous gimmick, given maybe a minute of any screen time and ultimately resolved with such ludicrous ease one feels a bit bad for the prop workers who designed and built the elaborate but completely pointless thing.

Mostly, though, the characters start searching the house, running through the hallways from the prologue, and meeting sometimes-gruesome deaths by way of a bunch of "traps." They're not particularly inventive, either, with the gas chamber coming into play again and quickly. The most grotesque one has a character digging through the internal organs of another, searching for a key to escape a room before they're both cooked alive. One does have to chuckle at the apparent lack of communication on set or the shoddy editing when an observer casually calls to a victim—well after the heat has unmistakably gotten to that person.

Director Sean McNamara doesn't have a handle on the tone here, which is meant to be dread-inducing but also seems find the family—and, at times, their suffering—funny. The early bickering is more irritating in principle than it makes any of the characters—except the most obvious ones—worthy of such disregard.

Then again, the movie might not be trying for comedy at all. Most of the effects, especially the yellow surge from a live electrical wire, are cheap. The staging is often unconvincing (A supposed dog attack just looks as if the pooches are licking the actor's fingers), and the actors are performing at a level about 10 notches too high even for the terror they're meant to be experiencing. In particular, Sasso and Voight, who both seem incapable of not mugging for the camera, appear to believe they're in a completely different movie than everybody else.

The big revelation isn't much of one for those who have, as a couple characters yell at inopportune moments, read a book about some grisly history, but hey, it does lead to yet another idea that the filmmakers get to try and fail at doing. At its worst, Dangerous Game: The Legacy Murders is an ugly and nasty movie, but even at the low bar of its relative best, it's just incompetent.

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