This is the kind of movie that people buy because the store is out of blank tapes. The back of the box said it was "deadlier than The Matrix", so I knew it had to be worthless. The story starts out with a bunch of criminals meeting in a warehouse, and they get busted by the cops. There's a big shootout, and it's all in slow-motion. Now, I have no problem with slow motion if it's done right. For example, in the movie Face-Off, directed by John Woo, there's a scene in which Nicholas Cage gets out of his limo, and his long coat is flowing in the wind. It's beautiful. In this movie, on the other hand, it sucks. Everyone who gets shot has to die in slow motion, and I got the distinct impression that they didn't actually slow the film down to do it either.
After the ordeal, the bad guy starts kidnapping people and putting them into this virtual reality thing called Expect to Die. He also makes it a point to say, "Expect to die" every time he starts the program. So, these people have to go through this simulation without getting killed, which never happens. Meanwhile, the hero, whose wife is pregnant, starts looking for the bad guy. Imagine Jean-Claude Van Damme only lamer. That's our hero. Well, the cops got ahold of the metal briefcases they found at the place where the shootout was, and they were full of money, cocaine, diamonds, and floppy disks. All the floppies had bullet holes in them which made it a little harder to read them. They somehow are able to read the disks, and they talk about this game designer whose games are "more real than real", which I guess means the games are super realistic, right? But every time they show the people inside the game, it looks like the effects team went out of its way to make it look like a bad video game. Don't you think it'd be easier and more convincing if they just filmed things as they were and called it the game?
So, the bad guy is killing innocent people with his game, and each victim has to be decapitated, both in the game and in reality. In order to do this, the bad guy uses a big axe with buttons on it. In other words, he uses a digital axe. Well, the bad guy captures the hero's woman and the hero and puts them both in the game, and rather than kill them like a normal bad guy should, he plays fair, and the hero wins. So, the big end fight ensues. They somehow get to this barn, and they each fire at least 20 rounds at each other without hitting anything or reloading. This was possibly the worst fight scene I've ever seen. Have you ever played a video game where the boss isn't exactly hard to beat, just time consuming? (Think the Wampa in Super Empire Strikes Back. It wasn't hard to kill. You just had to shoot it 400 times.) That's how the bad guy was. Ultimately, the good guy wins, and they go home.
Now, there's a trick to making successful action movies. The villain has to be nearly invincible, and the hero has to lose every fight he's in until the final showdown. That's why the final showdown matters. In this POS, however, the hero wins every fight, thus no suspense. Sure the hero's partner dies, but I get the impression they threw that in when they decided something had to go wrong. As a result, the whole movie did.