AGoodReed October 6th 2021, 6:01 pm
I have now seen the movie! It was available on Hoopla, so I used one of my monthly borrows on it.
I actually enjoyed it a fair bit. It's about a girl in 1990 who loves playing a side scroller game called Max Cloud where you can play as various members of Captain Cloud's crew. She finds a secret room with a space witch (or wizard) who offers to grant a wish. Then her dad comes in and takes her game away for the weekend so she doesn't play it the whole time he's out of town. She makes the wish that she could just play games all the time, and the witch in the game magically transports her into the game as the character she'd just been playing: the ships cook. Then her friend Cowboy (that's his only name) comes in and finds her in the game, so he has to control her and try to not get her killed.
Scott Adkins was fun as the title character, even though he wasn't the main protagonist. He was kind of like Buzz Lightyear in that he was a boisterous and somewhat naïve space hero who didn't take a lot of time to think things through before jumping into a fight. His fights were violent, but there wasn't much blood because they happen in a video game against aliens, I guess. But he wasn't afraid to kill. The most prominent hand-to-hand fight was in the trailer.
The acting was pretty entertaining during the in-game scenes. The villains were kind of hammy, which I love. The protagonists were believable. Unfortunately, the actor playing Cowboy was about the only person from outside of the game whose acting I could appreciate. The main female actress sounded like she was just reading lines most of the time. I didn't believe her.
The video game style was kind of like a lower budget version of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. It was funny to see Max Cloud get into the video game fighting pose, complete with the little standing bounce characters do in games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat when they're not attacking. All his moves are like things you'd find in a video game, too.
There are other types of battles in the film. There's one two-on-one projectile boss battle where the two good guys have their backs to the viewer while they shoot at the villain who stands on a platform and fires energy blasts at them. I'm not sure what game that mimics, but I've seen it before. And then there's another boss fight where all Cloud has to do to avoid the boss is to hide behind a table. The bad guy can't find him even when he was looking right at him as he moved out of sight.
There's one boss fight where the limited budget of the film becomes evident. A Sumo alien shows up to fight the three heroes at once, but the battle is only shown in digital mode on the TV screen that a character outside of the game is watching.
And then the final battle is like a Mortal Kombat fight with three rounds and a "FINISH HIM!" at the end.
I would totally buy this movie in heartbeat if I saw it at a dollar store or thrift store. That may sound like faint praise, but there are very few movies I would pay more than thrift store prices to own these days.
Paeter, if I were to record this review and email it to you, would you want to use it on the podcast? Or is the movie too old since it came out in 2020?