The idea is fun: a business offers to play with its clients' lives, disrupting their quotidian routines unannounced with challenge and intrigue. The client soon wonders whether he's made a mistake, wonders how far the pranks will go; the pranks are norm-breaking, maybe even illegal. At some point, paranoia sets in: are the little accidents and coincidences of daily life just as they appear or are they part of the game too?
Sadly, the writers took it too far. That the company operates legally and cares about its clients - that its stated purpose is its real one, no matter how crazy the pranks appear in the moment - strains credulity past breaking when it traps the protagonist in a car and plunges it into the San Francisco Bay, when it drugs him and ships him to Mexico, when it pretends to have ruined him or convinces him he killed his brother. In the end, he decides he's had enough, and steps from the roof of a tall building. He survives by landing on a cushion prepared by the company, as that, too, had been anticipated. Really? If he had decided to jump anywhere else, he would have died, and that's supposed to be fine? The movie world operates as the writers require it to; it has no internal logic.
And what is the main guy's arc meant to be? His brother put him through all that torment because he was "becoming an assole" - meaning, presumably, a joy-deprived business-obsessive. And we are meant to believe that he has been transformed constructively by a string of traumatic experiences that drove him to attempt suicide? No.
Sadly, the writers took it too far. That the company operates legally and cares about its clients - that its stated purpose is its real one, no matter how crazy the pranks appear in the moment - strains credulity past breaking when it traps the protagonist in a car and plunges it into the San Francisco Bay, when it drugs him and ships him to Mexico, when it pretends to have ruined him or convinces him he killed his brother. In the end, he decides he's had enough, and steps from the roof of a tall building. He survives by landing on a cushion prepared by the company, as that, too, had been anticipated. Really? If he had decided to jump anywhere else, he would have died, and that's supposed to be fine? The movie world operates as the writers require it to; it has no internal logic.
And what is the main guy's arc meant to be? His brother put him through all that torment because he was "becoming an assole" - meaning, presumably, a joy-deprived business-obsessive. And we are meant to believe that he has been transformed constructively by a string of traumatic experiences that drove him to attempt suicide? No.