Gerard Butler (300) grunts and winces as Kable, the enduring avatar of a globally popular computer combat game whose exalted realism stems from the fact that it’s real. Michael C. Hall (Dexter) affects a broad southern drawl as the corporate bad guy who built this exploitative system, Ludacris phones it in as leader of a hacker movement dedicated to crashing the evil media empire, and Logan Lerman does OK as the teenage gamer whose skills are either keeping Butler in play or putting him at risk of termination (it’s not exactly clear). Directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor were responsible for the delirious Crank and Crank 2 but left the magic behind when they threw together this tedious mash-up of Tron, Rollerball, The Matrix, etc. R, 95 min.