logo
VidMate
Free YouTube video & music downloader
Download
The Gamers: Hands of Fate (2013)

The Gamers: Hands of Fate (2013)

GENRESAdventure,Comedy,Fantasy
LANGEnglish
ACTOR
Brian S. LewisTrin MillerSamara LermanJesse Lee Keeter
DIRECTOR
Ben Dobyns,Matt Vancil

SYNOPSICS

The Gamers: Hands of Fate (2013) is a English movie. Ben Dobyns,Matt Vancil has directed this movie. Brian S. Lewis,Trin Miller,Samara Lerman,Jesse Lee Keeter are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2013. The Gamers: Hands of Fate (2013) is considered one of the best Adventure,Comedy,Fantasy movie in India and around the world.

When Cass (Brian Lewis) sets his eye on scoring a date with Natalie (Trin Miller), one of the world's top Romance of the Nine Empires players, she issues him a challenge: to show that he's gamer enough to win this year's national championship. Determined to prove that he can win any game, Cass enlists his long-suffering game buddy, Leo (Scott C. Brown) to teach him everything he needs to know about collectible card games. But The Legacy, a group of hardcore gamers with an evil plan, has raised an army of the undead to win the game for themselves.

More

The Gamers: Hands of Fate (2013) Trailers

The Gamers: Hands of Fate (2013) Reviews

  • A change of pace, but a good one.

    bpierce2013-09-07

    Those I've spoken to who have watched G:HoF seem divided into two camps. The first camp is disappointed, because the movie isn't what they expected. In fairness, G:HoF is quite a departure from Gamers and Gamers: Dorkness Rising. The humor is more subdued, and the storyline is much more pronounced; the film is primarily character-driven rather than situation-driven. The second camp...and I fall firmly in this camp...are pleased with the movie for precisely those reasons. I honestly think that if they'd tried to do a third movie exactly in the vein of the original, it would have fallen flat. There are only so many joking references to gaming tropes and clichés you can make before the material starts to become stale. Instead, the third movie builds on the characters established in the second, fleshing them out and humanizing them; making them less caricatures and more fully-fleshed characters. Cass takes the role of protagonist, and while he's still the same cocky, hyper-competitive power-gamer, he's given a chance to demonstrate other facets of his personality; there's real character development here, and you find yourself rooting for him as the film progresses. Leo gets a welcome chance to be something other than "the guy who dies a lot"--I personally think that Scott Brown is one of the most talented actors in a talented cast, and it's nice to see him get a chance to show it. The focus is on a collectible card game in this film, but I found that much of the humor is a loving send-up, not just of CCGs or gaming conventions, but of epic fantasies and their tropes, with a good dose of spaghetti Western thrown in. Most of the well-worn and well-loved conventions are here: the rebellious loner who comes to down to find it beset by a tyrannical band of marauders; the call to heroism; his initial resistance ("I'm just passing through") worn down as he comes to care for the community; his arrival at the last minute for the showdown with the villain. One discordant note for me is Gary's subplot. It starts off funny, but quickly goes in a very dark direction that doesn't seem to mesh well with the overall tone of the film...less "Eccentric gamer" and more "Seriously psychologically disturbed gamer." While, yes, there were over-the-top acts of violence in the earlier films, those were generally confined to the characters within the games. Seeing similar behavior from one of the players comes across as less funny and more disturbing. Apart from that, though, the film's a very solid and enjoyable one, and one I plan to both own and watch again.

    More
  • A great movie about fantasy gaming with heart

    jpace2013-08-15

    Though initially dismissive of customizable card games and its player base, when the abrasive Cass meets beautiful gamer girl Natalie he enters a tournament for the CCG Romance of the Nine Empires in order to wrangle a date from her. In an alternate reality, the heroic princess Myriad searches for a way to protect the kingdom of Holden from the wars that rage across the world of Countermay. She begins to suspect, however, that her fate is controlled by something altogether outside of her reality. Will Cass get the girl? Will the land of Holden survive the coming war? The fate of the land of Countermay depends on the outcome of Cass's CCG tournament...or is it the other way around? For viewers unfamiliar with the previous movies The Gamers and The Gamers:Dorkness Rising (the original movie was more of stand-alone, extended sketch comedy skit than a full-fledged movie, and featured few of the same characters from its two sequels) , the story should be pretty easy to follow, though a few elements may leave some people scratching their heads, and some of the humor might fall a little flat with those who aren't familiar with the gaming community and its tropes. Also, it should be noted that this is a low budget, Kickstarter-funded production, so the production values might be lower than what most viewers are used to which could be a turn-off. For returning fans, while Dorkness Rising focused on nice guy Lodge and his frustrations with both his dysfunctional role-playing group and a case of writer's block, Hands of Fate shifts its focus to the ultimately good-hearted jerk Cass. There's also a larger focus on the real world plot than there was in the last movie. I think Cass is an entertaining lead protagonist, so these aren't problems so much as things to be aware of. If you're hoping for a continuation of the story-within-a-story that was the focus of Dorkness Rising, you'll be disappointed, as one of the sub-plots of Hands of Fate is the fact that the gaming group can't seem to get together to play. Instead, we get to see into the world of Romance of the Nine Empires, a fictional CCG, and its inhabitants are their own entities rather than the extension of their players in the real world. This is a negative, in my opinion. It's not that the CCG world is any less engaging than the RPG world was, it's just that the fantasy storyline was never the point in the first place--it was the dynamic of seeing the characters switching back and forth between their real and fantasy personas that made the whole thing fun. Unfortunately that's mostly absent here. As far as the acting is concerned, I thought the the main cast was pretty good. Brian Lewis as main character Cass did a great job, and takes a character that was originally designed as kind of an antagonist in Dorkness Rising and turns him into a relatable protagonist. One of my favorite performances is actually Scott C. Brown as Leo--while Leo was new to RPGs, he's actually experienced in CCGs, so his character gets to transform from fumbling newb to wise master, and I thought he was able to pull it off without it seeming like we were looking at a new character with the same face. Some of the less prominent acting can be a little hit or miss around the edges which is to be expected since the cast seems to be fleshed out a bit with amateur actors. What might be a problem to some viewers though is understanding when the acting is bad on purpose, such as when a character in the movie is himself playing a character and is meant to be bad at it. For instance, there's a sequence where a number of people are Live Action Role Playing, a sequence filled with bad deliveries and cheesy speeches--but they're supposed to be that way. I can see how some people might not get it if they're not really understanding what they're looking at. I do have a few nitpicks, mostly it just seems like a little more finesse could have been used. Sometimes Checkov's gun is set on the mantle a little too obviously, or points where I feel an emotional payoff for a storyline seemed a little too calculated. The one major problem I had was with the plot for the Gary character--it starts off amusingly silly but then goes off into a really darkly absurd place that's out of sync with the rest of the movie--while still being treated as just slightly kooky. In all, don't let the low budget or the niche genre nature of the material turn you off to the movie--it's a funny, smart movie about gamers. Sometimes they antagonize each other, sometimes they have different ideas on how things should be played, but at the end of the day they are there because they love gaming.

    More
  • Failure

    Kalyarin2013-08-19

    I was astoundingly disappointed with Hands of Fate. With Dorkness Rising I remember feeling like I was making so much noise laughing that the neighbors would wonder what was going on. Hands of Fate wasn't totally without laughs, but there were so few that it was not worth the boredom waiting between laughs. I mean, they have 2 previous movies and both are based off RPGs, both movies are a bunch of people playing D&D, then you see them playing their characters for "real". HoF was based off of a fictional CCG. The scenes in the CCG weren't played by the person playing the game (one of the things that made the other movies fun) because the cards were all being played by Cass, the biggest jerk from the first movie. So basically, they took 95% of what made the first 2 movies great, threw it out the freakng window, and went a whole new way, and tried to convey some messages that I really didn't care about. I was at Gen Con 2013 and was really sad that they didn't have copies of Hands of Fate for sale there. Now I'm glad they didn't, because I'd be mad if I'd blown money on that boring movie. The only redeeming thing about the movie, in my opinion, is the ending. The very end left open the possibility that the 4th Gamers movie might be what the 3rd should have been. I certainly won't be spending any movie on it until after I've seen it though.

    More
  • Stupid and Vile

    lluewhyn2015-05-03

    My wife and I were over at a friend's house and found out that he had obtained a copy of this movie and asked if we wanted to watch it. We ended up being tortured for nearly two hours. We all really liked the first Gamers movie. Despite its very cheap budget, it was fairly well done and focused. Although some jokes at random gamer culture were tossed around (such as the one college gamer with a girlfriend who ditches the game to go out on an actual date), the humor was primarily about one thing: how ludicrous the story would actually look based upon the actions, rules and die rolls of the game. Although the gamers were all typically dorks, you could laugh at the portrayal and see the various ways that we all have acted like that in the past. For the most part, a lot of the scenes actually came off as actual videotapes from a game. The second one had a higher production budget but was a lot more scattershot in its targets. Although there was a little bit of odd humor in the way the game would play out based upon player actions, there was also jokes about ineffective character classes, a complete novice somehow combining obscure feats and traits to make an OP character, a male player playing a female character completely wrong, and random gaming references like light-sabers and cards from Munchkin. There were still plenty of jokes that hit the mark, despite them being all over the place. One other noticeable change is that the characters were a lot less sympathetic. The DM was a rail-roader, but an otherwise nice guy, and his new girlfriend was also a positively portrayed dork. However, the three main players consisted of two obnoxious jerks and one guy who was creepy and apparently mentally ill. These were the kind of players that you would quit games if they joined. Which brings us to this third movie. The entire movie focuses on one of the aforementioned jerks attempting to win a Gen Con card game that's like Magic combined with a campaign story. The card game isn't something that we can relate to because it's not similar to anything currently on the market. Therefore, the scenes from what's taking place have no basis of comparison to anything the audience has experienced. They are all awfully rendered with horrendous computer backdrops as opposed to actual scenes on location like the previous movies. There's also an overall narrative about the characters realizing that they're just pawns in a card game (hence the title) that goes basically nowhere. Oh, and did I mention that the reason that the aforementioned jerk is playing a card game at this convention just so he can try to get into a girl's pants? I don't just mean end up dating her, he's literally serious about using this opportunity to try to have sex with her. Plenty of other obnoxious and misogynous comments are dropped all over the place as well, making gamer culture look absolutely repulsive. Although there is definitely sexism in gaming, the behavior of these players (including the protagonist) would likely result in a fight. (My wife said she'd knock the teeth in if other players made the kind of suggestive comments that these were making to her face). Virtually every portrayal of a gamer is negative in some way. They're either abusive, clueless, completely absorbed in their own reality or all of the above. Even Lodge and Joanna having a healthy relationship and mutual love of gaming are picked on for having almost no sex together. Gary, the slightly creepy player from the last movie goes full on creepy and psycho for laughs. There's a subplot about him having a hate-filled anger towards a cartoon character that caused his favorite television show to be cancelled, and taking it out on the actual hired mascot playing that character at the convention. He's shown physically assaulting this poor schmuck numerous times, and at one point kidnaps him and covers him in gasoline as revenge. Yep, we're supposed to be laughing at one of the main characters attempting to burn an innocent man to death because his favorite television show was cancelled. So, in summary, the plot of the story revolves around a despicable character playing a game neither he nor we care about in hopes of having sex with a woman who finds him repulsive. The "money shots" of seeing the game played in real action looks horrendous with poor special effects and drags on with little point. Finally, almost all other portrayals of characters other than the main protagonist are used to negatively portray gamers as anti-social psychos who have too much time and money on their hands. I'll give it two stars because despite all of the dreck there were actually a couple of jokes that were actually funny (the scene where the protagonist is confronted by the Legacy in the hallway was clever), and the movie finally comes to some kind of competently written climax in the final card match. The rest was just unbearable to watch.

    More
  • Did not connect with the story...

    john-cathcart2014-05-18

    One of the things that made the first two movies in this series great was that I could identify with the characters in the movie. I saw bits of myself and other gamers I've known in those characters. I also understood the game and the rules the movie was based around (Dungeons and Dragons) which only further pulled me into the story. When I originally heard that there was to be a third movie in the series, I, and my entire gaming group were immensely excited about it. We couldn't wait to see where they took their characters next or what kinds of ridiculous things might happen... then we all saw it and a resounding sense of disappointment set in. Now the movie wasn't about a group of gamers playing a game that we recognized or understood with characters we could identify with. It was about a single gamer playing a fictitious game that no one could ever really identify with on the same level as the other movies because no one has ever played that game. Even if we have played other card based games like it, we haven't played THAT game and have no understanding of the rules or reasoning behind it. There was no roleplaying, no game to recognize and laugh about or think that the players were using a clever twist on the rules, and no connection to the story. Ultimately, while it had better production value than the previous movies, I never connected with the movie in any kind of meaningful way and generally which left me feeling disappointed. I'm not saying it's a bad movie, because it isn't a bad movie. It just was just missing everything that I found fantastic about the first two movies.

    More

Hot Search