Stay Alive: It was more difficult to stay awake.

Shockingly, these four careers managed to survive this movie.

Maybe because I didn't see the director's cut of Stay Alive I found it to be so lacking in substance that not even I could enjoy it. I would be curious to see this with nearly an extra fifteen minutes of footage that even introduces a new character and subplot, but I'd have to be pretty bored first to take that risk.

This relatively tame movie relies too much on the video game sequences, so just as you're getting into the spooky vibe and are ready to jump, you get wooden video game graphics leering at you instead. Yawn. It doesn't help that there's no plot other than the overdone 'Friend was playing this video game no one else has ever seen and then dies mysteriously and his best friend ends up with this game but feels weird to play it because that's the last thing his friend was doing when he died, but hey, it's alright because this guy has plenty of stereotypical gamer friends who insist they play it, and all disregard the creepy vibe they get when they're asked to recite a bizarre seance poem about Elizabeth Bathory, and then these gamer friends all start dying in the game, and oh my god they're dying just like they did in the video game and now it's up to them to stay alive and stop the horror!' plot. Nothing new here, including the fact movies based on this weak of a plot line have always been boring.

While I'm thankful that the PG-13 rating kept the gore for the sake of gore out of it, it puts this childish gloss over everything, like they were being too careful to keep that rating. Was it because they figured they needed all the Frankie Muniz fans to boost ticket sales? Or did they really think that they were being all creepy and scary by skipping back and forth between lame computer graphics and live action? Yes, it's interesting to watch the game mimic what's happening in 'real life', but there's no real sense of danger or urgency, even as characters get killed off.

The cast is made up of actors who have all managed to shake this movie off and maintain solid careers, which completely flies in the face of the curse of B-movie-ness, and bad B-movie-ness at that. Sophia Bush who plays the typical goth girl went on to One Tree Hill, for example, and Frankie Muniz is a lucky enough little bastard to have a choice between acting roles, or being a race car driver. Jimmi Simpson and Adam Goldberg were in the movie Zodiac. Even Milo Ventimiglia managed to survive his cameo role as the first victim to go on to be Peter Petrelli in Heroes. I think this 'actor career survival' phenomenon is what I find the most interesting about Stay Alive, which shows how little I took from the actual movie.

This could have just been made for television instead of released to a theater, but it apparently did quite well, and made a tidy profit over it's nine million dollar price tag. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed there won't be a Stay Alive 2, since they did the typical bad movie ploy of wrapping things up, and then unwrapping them as messily as a spoiled brat with too many presents on Christmas morning. If they'd have left things where they were at one minute before the ending, I might have been a little more impressed, which is to say, even remotely impressed.