"...when I get back I want you naked as a candy cane" -- Ashley to Rudy as he is about to walk into their hotel room

Reindeer Games is the latest effort from director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, Ronin) and as much as I like his work, it's hard to find a lot to like about this contrived tale from writer Ehren Kruger. Kruger, who was the genius behind last year's excellent Arlington Road has come up with a storyline that might have worked better if he'd tried to use just a few fewer twists.

Rudy Duncan (Ben Affleck) and Nick (James Frain) are convicts about to be released from prison. They are cellmates and have become close friends. Nick is the one of the two who has something to look forward to upon walking out the gate in 3 days, Ashley (Charlize Theron). She is a beautiful woman who has been writing to Nick through some prison pen-pal deal and she is going to be at the gate to meet Nick. Rudy has listened in rapt fascination as Nick has read and re-read the letters from Ashley aloud.

Unfortunately, another prisoner believes that Rudy "ratted him out" and he intends to get revenge. But it is Nick and not Rudy who gets stabbed with a shiv during a food fight in the cafeteria. So when Rudy is released and he sees the lovely Ashley waiting for the now deceased Nick, he cannot help but give into the primal desire for this woman and he pretends to be Nick.

That's his downfall. It goes well at first until he hears the quote above. When Rudy goes into the hotel room to get naked he finds Ashley's brother Gabriel (Gary Sinise) and the thugs that make up the rest of the gun-running gang that Gabriel runs. Gabriel knows from Ashley that Nick used to work at a casino and it is his intent to use Nick's inside knowledge of the casino's operation to rob the place on Christmas Day. Rudy may have only been pretending to be Nick, but to confess now is to ask to die.

There are as many twists and turns from that point forward as you might imagine, some of which work and some of which don't. Frankenheimer has assembled an excellent cast, which includes Clarence Williams III, Isaac Hayes and Dennis Farina, in addition to the already named players. Their acting isn't the problems. It's the contrived nature of the story, the difficulty in believing the baby-faced Affleck as a thug, and the difficulty in believing several of the major plot points that made Reindeer Games seem a poor movie for me.

But there are a few things to enjoy. Some of the sequences we see show the genius of Frankheimer's direction and ability to capture our total attention. There just aren't enough of these to make Reindeer Games worth recommending.