Thoroughly dishonest thriller centered around a forty-eighth-birthday gift certificate (brother to brother, Sean Penn to Michael Douglas, dimpled chin to jutted jaw) redeemable at a low-profile outfit called Consumer Recreation Services. The particular service offered therefrom is spelled out cryptically as "a profound life experience" and "an experiential Book-of-the-Month Club," or, in short, "a game," the object of which is to figure out the object. In the course of it, the hero is plunged into a sequence of annoying, unsettling, upsetting, hair-raising, life-threatening, sanity-testing events which we watch with rapidly evaporating hopes of a satisfactory explanation. An explanation is eventually forthcoming, but it won't wash. The major snag in this sort of premeditated nightmare is that the sequence of events depends upon the hero responding in ways he cannot possibly be depended upon to respond, even after the preliminary gauntlet of exhaustive psychological and physical exams. (What kind of ending would we have if he had waited another half-second before he fired his revolver?) David Fincher, the director of Seven, and here clinging desperately to the "edgy," has an evident level of skill, unequal however to his level of misjudgment. Deborah Kara Unger, Carroll Baker. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd