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Slice of Life

Cast from hit TV comedy ‘Workaholics’ star in Netflix film ‘Game Over, Man!’

Courtesy of Netflix

Blake Anderson, Adam Devine and Anders Holm look out a broken hotel window.

“Game Over, Man!” is an adventure about three hotel housekeepers who take on a group of hostage-taking gunmen. The Netflix original film offers plenty of shock value — especially for grandparents.

“We want to shock all the grandmas out there,” joked Adam Devine, one of the movie’s stars, in a nationwide conference call with student journalists. The Daily Orange participated in a pre-screening of the movie.

The movie is going directly to Netflix and stars the “Workaholics” trio, including Devine, Anders Holm and Blake Anderson. The script was first written six years ago by the three and has been slowly revised over the years between seasons of “Workaholics.”

“We wanted to make the movie much larger and much bigger than anything you’ve seen from us,” Devine said.

The group took the script to several studios but ultimately decided to work with Netflix because of the creative freedom it allowed them. Netflix began making original movies in 2015 with “Beasts of No Nation.”



“Netflix came in in a real way and gave us a budget that we wanted and needed to make the movie feel as big and fun as we wanted it to feel,” Devine said.

The movie is labeled as action/adventure, but for the most part, comedy is the underlying genre. It includes equal amounts of action and fight scenes, dangerous stunts, internal conflicts, nudity and flat-out outrageous jokes. The shock value is an important part of the film, Devine said.

“There’s not nudity for nudity’s sake,” Devine said. “It is pushing the story forward.”

The movie features cameos from a variety of movie, music, TV and Vine stars. Cameos range from Action Bronson and Shaggy to Steve-O and Chris Pontius, members of the “Jackass” crew.

“Shark Tank” investor and entrepreneur Mark Cuban also makes an appearance in the movie. He approaches Devine, Holm and Anderson after they save the hotel from the gunman and offers them a deal to create a video game based on the experience.

This is the group’s first opportunity to branch out from TV work and create a film together. “Workaholics” first aired in April 2011 and ran for seven seasons.

“It was kind of refreshing to have all those freedoms a movie allows you to have,” Anderson said.

After completing seven seasons of “Workaholics,” the group felt ready to take the next step and shoot the movie. Devine and Anderson said that if they filmed the movie at any other point in their careers, they might not have been ready.

“If we had done this movie during season one or two of ‘Workaholics,’ we might have been overwhelmed,” Devine said. “I think we got to this movie at the perfect place in our lives and careers.”





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