躁狂的1997年惊悚片“游戏”并未出现在许多“最佳旧金山电影”卷板上。显然包括导演戴维·芬奇（David Fincher）的名单。

The filmmaker, who directed “Zodiac” and “The Game” in the city,told an Indiewire reporterin 2014 that he probably shouldn’t have made the latter movie.

“我们没有弄清楚第三幕，” Fincher告诉Indiewire。“这是我的错，因为我认为如果您只能将脚踩在油门上，那将是解放和有趣的。”

也许像我们许多人一样，芬奇需要给电影另一个机会。“游戏”并不是一件杰作，它仅适用于少数旧金山电影，包括“ Vertigo”和“ The The The The Consings”。但这是在旧金山拍摄的最有趣的电影院之一。而且它的老化非常好。时间使电影拱起了必须看到的状态。

“The Game” features Michael Douglas, in the middle of his run as a Hollywood leading man, playing what turns out to be a combination of his pushed-to-the-edge company man in “Falling Down” (1993) and the corporate raider from “Wall Street” (1987). Douglas is San Francisco financier Nicholas Van Orton, who has a cold approach to business and personal relationships, heightened by the suicide of his father.

Van Orton’s unreliable younger brother Conrad (Sean Penn) gifts Nicholas a voucher for “the game,” run by a mysterious company called Consumer Recreation Services. The masterminds at CRS contaminate Van Orton’s life, sending him on a hellish journey that challenges both the businessman’s superior attitude and emotional distance from his fellow man.

“游戏”中的游戏很荒谬，这一直是电影的主要敲门声。(This feature will be light on spoilers for a 22-year-old film, but be warned there are a few coming.) The screenwriters and Fincher chose not to reveal the nature and motivation of the game’s puppet masters until the last 10 minutes, so the complicated machinations behind what’s happening to Van Orton are not explained — except for some very quick exposition in the end scenes.

在一集大活动播客with “The Game” superfan Beth Spotswood, Beth and I tried to break down the economics of the game. We agreed the cost for Conrad’s CRS voucher, with all the bribes, break-ins and damaged property necessary to complete Van Orton’s journey, has to top $1.2 million … in 1997 dollars.

But the suspension of disbelief in “The Game,” always in the name of entertainment, is much less distracting three decades later. This approach of a mystery-wrapped-in-a-puzzle-wrapped-in-a-surreal journey is an entire genre on modern television. Well-received entertainment including “The OA,” “The Leftovers” and “Stranger Things” have established that precisely how and why things are happening isn’t as important as the existential outcome.

在几乎各个方面，时间都是“游戏”的朋友。芬切尔（Fincher）显然是希区柯克（Hitchcock）的粉丝，他对记录1997年旧金山的记录与捕捉他的主角一样。而且他发生在城市历史上的重要时期，看来是在旧货币主导地位被这座城市的技术增长所黯然失色之前的那一刻。With few period piece tells (Van Orton’s cell phone is not distractingly big), “The Game” matches the greatest San Francisco location movies — “Dirty Harry,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” etc. — in capturing both the look and mood of the city at a critical time.

Douglas appears in every sequence, and “The Game” is arguably a top-five career role for him. Penn is superb in a much smaller role. No matter what the awards say, “edgy and paranoid Sean Penn” has always been the best Sean Penn in film, more interesting than “brooding Sean Penn” or “flawed yet noble Sean Penn.”

边缘上有许多令人难忘的人物，包括几个当地人 - 长期的美国音乐学院领导人彼得·多纳特（Peter Donat）擅长担任律师，并寻找49ers Great Keena Turner作为警察。詹姆斯·雷霍恩（James Rebhorn）在测试范·奥顿（Van Orton）的CRS中间商时特别有趣，屏幕传奇人物卡洛尔·贝克（Carroll Baker）在现场女仆中有美好的时光。

如果“游戏”获得了当之无愧的名望，那么电影中将进行巡回演出。

The Filoli mansion in Woodside substitutes flawlessly for Van Orton’s Sea Cliff or Marin estate. (We can’t tell which, because while the Bay Bridge is important in the film, Fincher doesn’t show the Golden Gate Bridge once.) Van Orton famously plunges through the glass ceiling in the Garden Court Restaurant of the Palace Hotel at 2 Montgomery St.

But Fincher, his location scouts and production designer Jeffrey Beecroft got the little things right, too. A Google search in 2019 reveals that the New Moon Chinese restaurant, pivotal to Van Orton’s investigations in the film, is a real place still dispensing takeout.

Other unexpected locations include the lion house at the San Francisco Zoo and the pedestrian stairway into the south end of the Stockton tunnel. Fincher told The Chronicle in 1997 that he loved that spot, for both its topography and history as a location in cinema.

“I found these stairs and thought, ‘Wow this is fantastic,’ ” Fincher said. “It leads down to this great alley. Apparently that is the exact alley in ‘The Maltese Falcon’ where Mary Astor lures Archer and kills him. It has kind of a good cinematic pedigree.”

当时只有34岁的芬彻（Fincher）在1997年的这次采访中充满热情 - 关于在旧金山拍摄，并制作一部令人惊讶和招待电影观众的电影。Fincher在2019年应该以完全相同的感觉。

Given another chance, “The Game” adds to the cinematic pedigree of a great movie town.