In the near future, Jennifer Jason Leigh is Allegra Gellar, the world’s best game designer. The controls for her game look like pulsating handheld vaginas, and they attach directly to your spine with an umbilical cord. As the film opens, Leigh and a dozen others are test-driving her new virtual-reality game for the first time when she’s nearly assassinated by a man with a gun made of flesh that shoots teeth.
In case you couldn’t guess by now, eXistenZ was written and directed by David Cronenberg.
With various people wanting her dead, Allegra goes on the run with her company’s PR trainee, played by Jude Law. He’s never played her games before, so they get the necessary “bioport” installed in his back at a local gas station by attendant Willem Dafoe. Now Jude and Jen can play the game together to make sure it works.
The game plants Jude on the assembly line, cutting open mutated frogs for parts to make mini gamepods. This, incidentally, is where the movie starts to go south. Jen worries about her own gamepod, because it’s sick and diseased, and you wonder how the actors were able to keep a straight face.
Both Law and Leigh are fine, even if I suspect the latter is convinced she’s playing Elisabeth Shue. What’s Cronenberg trying to say in the Möbius-strip eXistenZ? Hell if I know! But for a while, I liked how he said it — gory amphibian parts, clitoral joysticks and all. —Rod Lott
Somewhere in the mess of 
Hypothetically, say two of your fellow police officers turn up dead, both with their windpipes smashed. Would you theorize the following: “Maybe it’s one of them karate weirdos like in the movies!” The hypothetical is also a rhetorical, because that’s what happens in the Chuck Norris film 
When Dan Brown’s 
It makes one colossal mistake: treating the source material as if it were literature. Look, I loved reading Code, but it’s a B-level thriller. Screenwriter Akiva Goldsman treats it as if it were a work of serious art, where every sentence had been constructed with precious care, like a Jenga tower, with designs on a Pulitzer Prize. In doing so, the fun is sucked clean out of it, leaving us with one history lesson (and quasi-history lesson) after another, all of which numb our attention. Although it hews closely to the original story, there’s nothing here that sheds light on why the novel sold 2 bazillion copies and counting. 
