A criminal mastermind captures six people that have issues in the past and makes them play a game to decide the fate of each other’s lives. Sound familiar? Yeah too familiar for me. Die is essentially a pg 13 version of Saw. The main differences are that Saw has some cool traps and some kick ass gore while Die is mainly dialogue that uninspired and pretty predictable. 

When I saw that Elias Koteas was one of the stars I had pretty high hopes for this movie. He’s a great actor and he had just come off the excellent Let Me In. But you know what. Even actors have to occasionally have to have their paycheck movies.


The movie introduces the characters one by one until their disappearance. Then eventually they all wake up to find themselves in a glass prison cubes with a guy that reveals to them they must play a game. What’s revealed is that all the characters at one point in their lives tried to kill themselves. So the characters are paired up and one has to roll a die (hence the title of the movie) to decide what kind of chance the opposite characters has to live. For instance one guy was going to kill himself with a gun so he had to roll a die to see how many bullets had to put in the revolver. Once the number of bullets are decided he then had to squeeze the trigger while pointing it at the other character. This was done a few times while some people lived and some didn’t. Sounds kinda cool but it really wasn’t. Most of the back stories of the characters was pretty lame and not very interesting. 

The scenes with the villain and the captors was actually the more interesting part of the movie. The rest of the movie was a couple of FBI agents trying to track down the kidnapped and to figure out the mystery of the dots that were found on them. Those scenes were csi/tv cop drama 101 level and nothing to think twice about.


Was there anything that I really liked? The acting was pretty solid overall and I thought it had a nice look to it. The ending also attempted to be something grand and it kinda worked. Other than that it was way too predictable and tame for the subject matter. I’m sure hardcore Saw fans that are looking for any kind of fix might like it but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else.
Rating: 5/10