Looking at the title of 2021’s Survive the Game, you may be tempted to wonder what game the characters are attempting to survive.

The answer is that there isn’t a game, unless you’re one of those people who still insists on using “The Game,” to refer to the drug trade because you once heard someone do the same thing on The Wire.

Though there are no games, the film is full of people who are trying to survive.  For instance, after a drug bust gone wrong, Detective David Watson (Bruce Willis) is trying to survive having been shot in the gut.  He manages to do so surprisingly well, even though he’s being held hostage by the bad guys.  The leader of the bad guys, Frank (Michael Sirow), is supposed to be a fearsome torture expert but David just smirks at him.

David’s partner, Cal (Swen Temmel), survives by running to a nearby farm.  The farm itself is owned by Eric (Chad Michael Murray), a veteran who is haunted by the death of his wife and who just wants to be left alone.  With the bad guys surrounding his farm and looking to eliminate all of the witnesses, Eric teams up with Cal.

There’s a lot of bad guys in this film and they’re all so eccentric that they really do become the main attraction.  The bad guys are occasionally entertaining.  They spend a lot of time bickering and each one has at least one particularly obnoxious personality trait that can be used to distinguish one from the other.  Most of them have a tattoos.  One has a mohawk.  Quite a few have brightly colored hair.  You can’t help but wonder how any of these people could possibly be successful criminals because they’ve all gone out of their way to make sure that it will be easy for law enforcement to spot and identify them.  To once again cite The Wire, Wee-Bey Brice yelled at at his son Namond for not shaving his head because the police would be able to easily spot Namond’s haircut.  Wee-Bey had a point.

Anyway, this is a siege film.  Cal and Eric spend almost the entire movie running around the farm and picking off bad guys.  For those of you who are into this sort of thing, some of the kills are imaginative and ruthless.  Interestingly, some of the bad guys are presented as being more sympathetic than the film’s heroes.  They have their own relationships and fears and they get upset when their friends are killed.  I actually felt a little bit bad for some of them. It makes Survive the Game slightly more interesting than the usual DTV B-action movie.

As you may have guessed, this is another Randall Emmett production.  Emmett is best-known for his ability to get former and current A-listers to take small roles in his B-movies.  As such, an actor like Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone would put in a day’s worth of work and the film could be advertised as starring Bruce Willis as opposed to Chad Michael Murray.  In Survive The Game, there’s a somewhat endearing moment that occurs when Willis appears to start laughing at the ludicrous dialogue to which he is being subjected.  That said, Willis was obviously not doing well when he appeared in this film and it does make some of his scenes somewhat difficult to watch.  The viewer really does end up missing the Bruce who could drive Alan Rickman to distraction.

Survive the Game is a film that I had long meant to watch, though I’m not sure why.  I think the title appealed to me.  Again, I’m not sure why.  It’s better than some of Emmett’s DTV action movies but it’s still pretty forgettable.  I would still watch a prequel about how the mohawk guy became a ruthless mercenary.  It seems like there’s probably a story there.