Reindeer Games

Year 2000 Trademarks:

• Ashton Kutcher bit part (as in previous 10YOM “Down to You”)
• Scripted by same person who wrote Arlington Road
• Tongue-in-cheek con/heist movie (see: Ocean’s 11, Get Shorty, Heist, The Score, et al.)

What’s it like 10 years later?

IT BELONGS TO MULTIPLE CIRCA-2000 SUB GENRES

Reindeer Games arrived in theaters at the crossroads of two questionable sub-genres — one in its final years, the other in its early ones — that met around the year 2000: the Tarantino Knockoff and the Anti-Christmas Movie. The former, Tarantino Knockoff, includes an endless wave of tongue-in-cheek heist flicks like 3000 Miles to Graceland, 2 Days in the Valley, Truth or Consequences N.M., and virtually everything Guy Richie has ever touched. The Anti-Christmas film, conversely, was just getting started. Flicks like Fred Claus, Bad Santa, The Ice Harvest, Christmas With the Cranks, and Deck the Halls demonstrate that the 2000s were as flush with ironically depressing Yuletide stories as the ’90s were with hyper-literate bank robbers. (A fact either fascinating or pointless, or both: The early postmodern Christmas movie The Santa Clause was released exactly a month after Pulp Fiction, in 1994.)

Reindeer Games is a bit of both: a Tarantino Knockoff set during the Holiday Season. As the movie opens, Rudy (Ben Affleck) is released from a brief stint in the slammer for jacking cars and hooks up with an attractive pen-pal (Charlize Theron), only to be held hostage by her bank-robbning brother (Gary Sinese) to heist a high-profile Native American casino on Christmas Eve (which I’ve concluded is the most depressing place and time combination you could ever imagine).

In a way, the two sub-genres Reindeer Games falls between two are a perfect match: The Tarantino Knockoff strives to reach that dark, violently comic tone best reprsented by Resevoir Dog’s image of Michael Madsen slicing off a cop’s ear to the tune of a chirpy ’70s pop song. Timing your sleazebag-filled heist film during th Most Wonderful Time of the Year allows for all sorts of  fucked-up moments like these — murders and drunken stumblings sarcastically set to the tune of “Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas.” (Sadly, Reindeer Games lost much of its Christmas association due to last-minute studio scrambling to salvage what was a decidedly shitty movie: it was released 3 months after Christmas, and for a breif period was renamed with the most genereic title ever concieved: “Deception.”)

THE GREAT “BEN AFFLECK WAVE” OF THE EARLY ‘00S

You can’t watch Reindeer Games without considering the career of its star, Ben Affleck, in the decade since the movie was released. While I try not to make it a habit of crying over millionaries married to Jennifer Garner, I do find myself oddly invested in the tumultuous career of Mr. Affleck over the last 10 years. (Perhaps it’s the lingering Kevin Smith fan crying out from my 15-year-old inner-self.) At any rate, Reindeer Games sent me back to the great wave of Ben Affleck movies that flooded theaters between 1998 and 2003 (or after Armageddon made $201 million but before Gigli… um… didn’t). Falling within the great “Ben Affleck Wave” of the early 21st Century may be the most dated aspect of Reindeer Games, a film that is otherwise rather generic. The “Ben Affleck Wave” is familiar to any Kevin Smith fan who obediently followed Affleck from Mallrats to his post-Michael Bay leading-man roles. These include (in addition to Reindeer Games) Forces of Nature, Bounce, Changing Lanes, and Phantoms.

HENCHMEN ARE THE BEST PART OF HEIST MOVIES

Fact: In films involving a motley crew, that motley crew tends to be made of character actors far more enjoyable than their leaders, a random collection of familiar –- if not famous –- faces. My favorite example of this phenomenon can be found in 1996’s Twister, which starred Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, but in 2010 is way more fun to watch for the zany Tornado Chasing team, including a younger Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck, Joey Slotnick, Jeremy Davies and future In the Bedroom director Todd Field.

Reindeer Games’s bank robbing henchmen are no less enjoyable in their “Hey! It’s that dude!” quality. In addition to future Grounded for Life star (and MTV’s “Jimmy the Cab Driver”) Donal Logue and Dennis Farina (who, I finally realized, always plays a gangster, though never in a drama), Reindeer Games features Clerence Williams III, better known as Linc from The Mod Squad and Half Baked’s “Sampson!,” who has perhaps the funniest line in Reindeer Games, delivered at the end of an agressively dark scene: