The acting in this film is good, Michael Douglas was really good. I liked the sound effects too. The plot is not entirely bad until Nicholas attempts suicide, but what happens after ruins all: the worst end of all time that makes this movie a mess with the worst plot ever. It turns out that Nicholas is brought to suffer, lose all money, risk his life, kill his brother and commit suicide, but in reality it was all a staging just because his brother Conrad considered him an asshole. WTF! In the end Nicholas also thanks Conrad and the other people that took part and also asks the woman who almost killed him to go out with him... This movies doesn't make any sense, it leads you to feel that it has one meaning for the whole plot, (the scene about the father that commit suicide, the gold wristwatch) but it has no meaning, the end scene ruins everything!

Yeah it got me going for a little while there, thought this one was nicely building to one of those movies that plays deftly with the mind of both protagonist and viewer. A lot of you guys were fooled too considering the rating - this thing averages near 8/10, are you serious?Boy oh boy that ending... I don't ever remember an ending of a film so badly souring everything that's gone before. Wicker Man & the first "It" adaptation come close... "It" disappoints while "Wicker Man" through laziness ruins everything that comes before (and the dumb ones in the audience think it's being clever). But this ending takes the cake. So they knew exactly how this guy would react, in a moment of extreme emotional torment, because humans are so predictable at the best of times, let alone under extreme emotional duress. They knew he would shoot, they knew he would jump. They knew precisely what part of the building ledge he would jump off, to the point they could plan where to put the big canopy to catch him. The ledge was a pretty wide ledge, had to be dozens of feet on one side, dozens on the other, but hey, they knew exactly what part he'd jump off. They trusted that he would land like a pro stunt man, on his back, not on his head, which would still have broken his neck, soft landing pad or no.And, um, the company doing all this... what the heck do they charge? The budget for this kind of ridiculous service would be many millions, so you're saying a skeptical Michael Douglas agreed to pay this before knowing what he was getting? And the company wasn't worried about being sued by a rich client if something went wrong, which, with this absurd set up and the risks involved, easily could have?Michael Douglas was good, which shouldn't surprise since he's playing more or less the same character he's played in nearly every film, the unsmiling corporate head honcho type. I gave it an extra star for that. This could have been a good movie if they had been willing to come to a different conclusion somehow, maybe something a bit more metaphysical, but then you might have confused a few of the stupider viewers, and as we can all see, those outnumber the rest of us. So you have to keep the cattle happy with junk like this. Enjoy. Moo, moo.

I waited an hour for anything credible to happen in this movie. It didn't. The second hour may well be genius but I will never know. I'd like to ask any of those leaving positive reviews: If you found a giant ventriloquist's dummy on your lawn would you bring it in the house and watch TV with it? No? Me neither. Say you did. When you found out it had a camera in it wouldn't you tell it to f**k off, throw it out and go to bed? I would. To be a thriller the premise must be at least a little bit credible. This is less believable, less gripping and less thrilling than Police Academy V.

Michael Douglas' performance superbly holds this film together. Now matter how ludicrous the plot becomes - and it does become ludicrous - Douglas plays it so that he and the audience together are none the wiser and piece it together at the same speed. Although it seemed highly original to me at first, in fact its plot owes a lot to the 1984 Remington Steele episode 'Elementary Steele'. The fact that punters have paid £500 to a business so as to take part in 'The Game' where a mystery is laid out for them around the city to solve; the fact that it starts to look like a scam; that the punters (playing Holmes and Watson) chase someone who they think is part of The Game but she protests she is not, and says she is just an actress, when she clearly knows more than she is letting on; plus. gunshots fired (at Remington Steele) in the street turn out to be blanks because the gun is part of the Game; plus, when Remington Steele visits the business's offices (doing his detective there), he finds almost no-one and nothing in the room (basic office furniture); etc, etc. All these things are developed in the Michael Douglas film, turning a light romp into a dark thriller that keeps you guessing. Highly entertaining and tense. It's increasingly less and less plausible but Douglas keeps you believing, just.