Drinking Games (2012) User Reviews

Fun Times

[timlin-4 · 5/10 · 22 March 2015]

Synopsis is not correct, it's not really about a group of friends who are trapped, and it doesn't involve anyone being manipulated into murder. The setting is an end-of-the-semester party in a dorm room of a guy who wants to lose his virginity and his roommate who is trying to finish a paper. But a charismatic and intimidating acquaintance shows up, and he gradually becomes more dangerous...

Rob Bradford does a great job playing this sinister lead, and there is enough suspense created by the uncertainty of what he will do next. But the other characters are kind of non-entities despite the time the screenplay puts into them, and their motivations and actions often don't make much sense. The ending is particularly unsatisfying, like they didn't have time to finish.

Lacking the thrills and suspense!

[richarddesmond · 1/10 · 28 April 2017]

I felt the urge to compile a constructively critical review on this platform, seeing as the filmmaker removed my comment(also constructively critical) on YouTube...very "professional".

Adapting a stage play as this is, falls prey to the age old concept that film is 80% visual and 20% audible and vice verse for plays, this was not translated well. With most of the film occurring inside a single room the film becomes visually stale and loses any visual impact for what was supposed to be a suspense thriller.... visually thrilling or suspenseful. It takes almost almost 50 minutes for anything interesting to occur, and when it does we are not rewarded for our patience for sitting through a fairly generic college party and whiny college guys and gals trying to get wasted, boost their ego and lose their virginity.

The character Noopie stood out as the notable actor in terms of performance, not amazing but good. He had the most interesting of desires within the film, the rest were fairly average roles, underdeveloped and there to be messed with by him, and have the usual clichés that you'd expect in a young adult/college film. To be fair, Richard and his gf had some depth to their character and conflict, but were in too few scenes together(they deserved more screen time, much more interesting than Sean and his gf...I say gf though there is zero chemistry between them), potential but not the required development.

This film isn't terrible, isn't great.. it's passable. With the idea of metaphorically killing off other characters with words and some action the writing needs to be razor sharp and very well crafted from all characters in order to sustain an interesting suspenseful thrilling plot that will hold the attention of the audience, but in my opinion it slumps in many places when it falls into weak/pointless scenes, generic and clichéd dialogue, characters who serve no purpose in the film and an inappropriate slow moving plot, missing the main points of a suspense thriller, my attention waned a few times.

Where is the suspenseful thriller I was promised? If you're after a well crafted, interesting, suspenseful, thrilling film, avoid!