Directed by David Fincher, The Game is an intricate, house of cards thriller about the fall and redemption of Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas). Nicholas is rich, the kind of second-generation rich that almost makes you sick. He lives high in the San Francisco hills in the biggest house on the block. He owns a massive investment banking firm. He wields the kind of power and influence usually reserved for heads of state and the Mafia. And, of course, he lives a shallow and lonely existence. Enter his brother, Conrad (Sean Penn), with the kind of birthday present only the moneyed can afford.

For Nicholas's 48th birthday (coincidentally, the same birthday that his father committed suicide), Conrad enrolls Nick in a game. Run by a mysterious conglomerate known only as Consumer Recreation Services, this game provides its players with a real-life role-playing experience specifically designed to infuse the player's life with everything that it lacks. Excitement, intrigue, passion: all will come from the unlikeliest of places... thanks to the game. According to Conrad, the game changed his life for the better, and it will do wonders for Nick.

Of course, nothing is as it seems and as the film progresses, the game sheds its playful pretenses and becomes a truly harrowing, paranoid experience sending Nicholas into a dangerous tailspin that leaves him at the end of his rope.

Michael Douglas is always at the top of his game when he's playing someone with power, be it an American President, or a Wall Street tycoon, and he doesn't disappoint. It also doesn't hurt that he looks more and more like his iconic father as the years go by. Fincher’s work as a director (the unsettling Seven and the claustrophobic misstep known as Alien3) has been uneven to say the least, but he does manage to craft a very keen thriller in The Game. Marshaling all the tools at his disposal -- eerie music; tense editing; dark, lush cinematography -- Fincher creates an engrossing urban nightmare.

The problem is, the nightmare is one that most of us could never experience. Like the Kurt Russell chiller Breakdown (written and directed by Jonathan Mostow, also The Game's executive producer), The Game is a "Jeez-am-I-glad-that-isn't-me" movie. But unlike Breakdown -- in which a man's wife is kidnapped right out from under him while driving cross-country -- you don't feel for Nicholas Van Orton. He is in this jam because he's rich; it's not some accident, or even a faceless crime. He wanted in, he got in, and the movie expects the audience to feel sorry for him.

Well, tough noogies.