In the movie “The Game,” Michael Douglas plays Nicholas Van Orton, one of those rich guys that is very easy not to like. With a name like Van Orton, you just know he has to be a prick.

He turns out to be a billionaire investment banker with all the trappings of the super rich: the cars, the exclusive club membership, the plane, the large staff of employees ready to kiss his butt on command.

He lives alone in a huge mansion — something roughly twice the size of Beardshear, but without the same warm-fuzzy friendliness.

On the surface, Nicholas thinks his life is going just fine. (See the above reasons.)

Fine until he gets a request for a lunch meeting with Seymour Butts. (Think Bart Simpson crank-calling Moe the bartender. “Hey guys, I wanna Seymour Butts.”)

Nicholas smiles a bit at the request and goes to the meeting, knowing it comes from his younger brother Conrad (Sean Penn).

The two couldn’t be more opposite, which is what I really liked about their relationship. Nicholas is the older, responsible one, while Conrad is the druggie screw-up who may or may not have finally gotten his life together.

Douglas and Penn play very well off each other, seeming to capture both sides of the brother relationship. There’s the caring side and then there’s the adversarial, competitive side.

Conrad presents Nicholas with a special birthday present, a gift certificate to something called Consumer Recreation Services, which promises to “make your life fun.”

This is where the fun of “The Game” really begins. The only way to describe the movie is to say it is a two-hour study in extreme paranoia.

Nicholas happens by CRS headquarters completely by accident. Or is it an accident? Since he’s there, he wants to find out exactly what the company does. It never is made clear to him.

After hours of psychological tests answering true/false questions like “I feel guilty when I masturbate” and “I like to kill small animals,” he still doesn’t know what is going on.

What he doesn’t know is CRS will individually tailor a game to provide him with whatever is lacking. The company is something like a party-planning arm of the CIA, if it had one.

At this point, Nicholas’ life gets turned upside-down. He doesn’t know who he can trust, other than the waitress from the restaurant at which he ate lunch. After all, she was around before he went to CRS, so he certainly can trust her. Can’t he?

Then the Game appears to be nothing but an elaborate ruse used to steal Nicholas’ vast fortune and kill him off.

Or is that the game? Or is it really just a plot to steal his money? Or is the plot the game? Keep going like this for awhile and you’ll get the general idea.

That’s the great thing about this movie. I started to get paranoid, not knowing which characters I could trust, or what was going to happen next.

For example, in one scene there’s an ordinary cable van parked on the street. Is it just an ordinary cable van? Is it CRS operatives?

“The Game” keeps you guessing up to the very end. There’s a lot of very clever elements I’m not going to give away here. Plus, I learned a couple of very valuable lessons. Clowns are evil, and when dealing with possible operatives of a covert corporation out to kill you, always pour your own cup of coffee.

4 stars out of five.

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Mike Milik is a senior in advertising from West Des Moines.