Scott Adkins, John Hannah, Lashana Lynch, Elliot James Langridge
Set in 1990’s Brooklyn, we meet teenage gamer Sarah (Isabelle Allen) who, after ignoring her grumpy dad’s advice of switching off her console whilst playing side-scrolling sci-fi action-adventure game
The Intergalactic Adventures of Max Cloud (think along the lines
Streets Of Rage… but in space!) she accidentally opens up a portal and is transported into the videogame. From here, her friend Cowboy must continue playing to try to find a way off of the game’s intergalactic prison planet in the hope of freeing her from her virtual reality.
You’d be forgiven for assuming
Parents in the 1980s wagged their fingers at their kids for getting figuratively sucked into video games. But maybe if more of those kids literally got sucked into video games, they’d have found them less compelling. That’s one theme for the new Scott Adkins VOD action movie
Max Cloud, which has a player getting pulled into a game,
Tron-style, and finding some embarrassing truths behind the big, familiar escapist tropes.
Game protagonist Max Cloud is the self-proclaimed hero of his own narrative: He’s the pilot of an intergalactic space cruiser, with a Greek god’s physique and a cocksure attitude earned through ferocious fighting prowess. Why wouldn’t he feel at least a little smug? But his ego is a smog enveloping his supporting ensemble, who he looks down on as mortal losers without appreciating the roles they play in his victories, or realizing they have more depth than him. “Kick ass first, ask questions if there are survivors” isn’t a replacement for a personality.