Mazes and Monsters

Good actors in search of a better screenplay adaption of a sensationalist novel? This was pretty awful. I _did_ love seeing old New York, and my towers. By the way, JayJay’s address doesn’t exist, and the route the kids take into the city to find Robby is a pastiche of random roads and bridges that make no sense.

By the end the movie seems to be a Rorschach Test, and it's developed in a way that I have no idea if that was the intention. Seeing all the different promotional material, I'm confident even the people in charge didn't really know if it's trying to pile on ("Four players in a dangerous game... Risking their hearts, their minds and their lives") or to counter the prevalent message that the game was dangerous in and of itself. [I also noticed there's a cut-down version of 74min, I don't know what's up with that but maybe it leans more one way] All the elements of 80s' smear campaigns are there, for sure, but it also shows that the game was just fun for most people, [spoiler]while at the same time being an escapism option for people already dealing with real world problems. There's both characters that directly blame the game and then there's Robbie's mom acknowleging he already had problems and that the game and his friends weren't to blame.[/spoiler] It's below average, but almost ok for a made-for-TV movie.