There's an old trick in screenwriting that if you don't know how to introduce a story, open with the main character stepping off a bus into virgin territory. That way everyone--the author, the protagonist, the audience--is in the same precarious circumstance, and ready for anything. Ehren Kruger's script for Reindeer Games is in that spirit: its prologue sees Ben Affleck's Rudy released from prison and approaching his murdered cellmate's beautiful pen pal (Charlize Theron) as that guy. And it can go anywhere from there; in an era when most genre films relent to formula right away, here's one with possibilities.

There are twists and turns. Other than to say the pen pal's gun-dealing brother shows up to pick ignorant Rudy's brain on a casino heist, I won't spoil Reindeer Games' pretzel of a plot here. The ending requires an inhuman suspension of disbelief, but if I held that against the film, I'd have to place last year's cult darling Pitch Black under citizen's arrest. All bets are off for Frankenheimer, the man who allowed Marlon Brando to wear an ice bucket on his head in the remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau. A 71-year-old veteran of thirty-five films, he's a real pro liberated by age and experience, and also a bit of a senile lunatic.

With 'Reindeer Games 2.0,' Frankenheimer promises a "much sexier and much edgier" film than what made it to cinemas. And he makes good on his word, although the title still undercuts the intent. It's important to note that despite a running time 21 minutes longer than the theatrical cut, some footage has been removed from it for the DC, namely Rudy's jokey asides. Affleck now comes across a more beleaguered hero and less like Chandler from "Friends" (too bad the tattoos remain), while gone is the passive kewpie doll that was Theron's Ashley, replaced by a woman of some character. You could say they both got their dignity back, thereby decreasing the amount of guilt in Reindeer Games' guilty pleasure status.

Frankenheimer's gripping commentary is worth the price of the Dimension DVD. He frowns upon the preview process, in which score cards with low numbers led to the initial butchery of Reindeer Games, and he breaks down the differences between the old and the new scene-by-scene, sometimes shot-by-shot. (Where scenes were altered, the theatrical version is included for comparison's sake in a bonus section. Alas, the seamless branching feature would've been appropriate here.) He's also careful to blame himself for approving the changes in the first place; it's a sympathetic rap session I'll probably listen to again down the road.

The outtakes are indistinguishable in video quality from the remainder of the crystal clear, 2.35:1, 16x9-enhanced transfer. I'm not wild about the film's icy blue colour scheme, but I can't imagine a finer representation of it. Contrast could be bolder, but a muted range of blacks seems to be Frankenheimer's style. The 5.1 Dolby Digital soundmix is more dialogue-driven than before, but where there's Frankenheimer, there's gunfire, so count on some LFE kick. Split-surrounds get cooking during a prison riot. Thus far unmentioned extras: a six-minute featurette devoted to cast interviews named "Reindeer Games: Set Pass", and the film's trailer.-Bill Chambers