Reindeer Games (2000)

There is a certain kind of movie that arrives dead on arrival, gets picked apart by critics, vanishes from theaters, and then quietly becomes the thing you watch at 11pm on Christmas Eve because nothing else is on and you remember it fondly. Reindeer Games (2000) is that movie. It's not good in any conventional sense, but it's committed to its own particular brand of ludicrous, and that counts for something.

Ben Affleck plays Rudy Duncan, a man days away from finishing a prison sentence, with plans to visit a Michigan casino he worked at before his conviction. His cellmate Nick has been corresponding with a woman named Ashley (Charlize Theron) who he's never met. Nick gets killed in a prison brawl. Rudy, perhaps inevitably, assumes Nick's identity when Ashley shows up at the gate. What follows is a Christmas Eve casino heist orchestrated by Ashley's brother Gabriel (Gary Sinise), who needs someone with insider knowledge of the casino's security setup. The problem: Rudy has no such knowledge. He was the parking lot attendant.

What Kind of Christmas Movie Is This?

The film was originally scheduled for a Christmas 1999 release. Dimension Films pushed it to February 2000 after test screenings produced a mixed response and reshoots were ordered. The irony is that Christmas is the movie's entire reason for existing. The countdown to December 25th structures the plot. The climax involves a gang of criminals in full Santa suits robbing a casino while Christmas music plays. Calling it a Christmas movie is not a stretch; it's practically a job description.

The holiday setting gives the film its best visual: a snow-covered Michigan casino decked out in lights and garland while a man is being tortured inside by a man in a Santa hat. John Frankenheimer, a director who made The Manchurian Candidate and Ronin, understood the value of that contrast. He may not have been able to fix the script, but he knew how to light a scene.

Ben Affleck and Gary Sinise: The Real Draw

Affleck was cast fresh off Armageddon and Good Will Hunting, at what looked like a career peak. He's fine here, doing reactive everyman work that doesn't ask much of him. The movie doesn't need him to be interesting; it needs him to be someone things happen to, and he's credible in that role.

Sinise, though, is doing something genuinely strange. His villain Gabriel is one of the more unhinged performances in late-90s action cinema. He plays menace as a kind of cheerful aggression, all smiles and sudden violence, and the movie lights up whenever he's on screen. Sinise had recently played Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump and was three years away from CSI: NY. Here, he's having a clearly good time being the worst person in any room.

Charlize Theron is badly served by the script's late-film contortions. She's given a character whose motivations shift to meet the plot's needs rather than any internal logic. The film asks her to carry a twist that doesn't fully land, and she does what she can with it.

Ehren Kruger's Script and Its Problems

Screenwriter Ehren Kruger was coming off Scream 3 and would go on to write several Transformers sequels, which tells you something about where his interests lay. The plot of Reindeer Games is not exactly a puzzle box; it's more of a puzzle box that someone sat on. The twists arrive with a kind of desperate energy, each one trying to reset the audience's expectations, and by the third or fourth reversal, you're watching the mechanics rather than the movie.

That said, the setup is genuinely solid. A man impersonating a dead cellmate to claim his pen pal is a good premise. The complication of the casino heist built on false expertise is a good engine. The film earns its first act and then spends its second and third acts spending that goodwill on increasingly improbable plot turns.

Frankenheimer's Last Film

Reindeer Games was John Frankenheimer's last theatrical release. He died in July 2002, and while this wasn't the film he wanted to go out on, there are traces of his craft throughout. The action sequences have weight and geography. The casino interior feels genuinely claustrophobic when it needs to. Frankenheimer had made films about paranoia and identity, and those themes are present here, even if they're buried under the plot's machinery.

He also released a director's cut on DVD in March 2001, running 124 minutes, with a different ending. The existence of that cut suggests Frankenheimer had a clearer vision for the film than what reached theaters. Whether the longer version is better is a question for a quiet Christmas afternoon with nothing else to do.

The film grossed $32.2 million worldwide against a $42 million budget. By any commercial measure, it failed. By the measure of films you find yourself watching again twenty years later because the premise is still kind of fun, the verdict is less clear.