Tetris

This new com­e­dy-dra­ma film inspired by the pop­u­lar Game­boy thumb­worm, Tetris, is not a dig­i­tal­ly-ani­mat­ed fam­i­ly adven­ture about how a plucky gang of geo­met­ric blocks of var­i­ous sizes/​shapes voiced by 2^nd-string SNL mem­bers can fit togeth­er into a sin­gle sat­is­fy­ing whole if they all just work towards a com­mon goal.

It is, in fact, a pop­py, ripped-from-Wiki legal pro­ce­dur­al about how a can­ny Amer­i­can busi­ness­man was able to prize the high­ly-cov­et­ed Tetris IP from the clutch­es of the Rus­sians, pop­u­larise the game through­out the world and foil a das­tard­ly British busi­ness mag­nate in the process.

What a time for a film to come out about west­ern com­mer­cial cap­i­tal­ism attempt­ing to locate eco­nom­ic loop­holes deep in the black heart of Sovi­et-era Rus­sia. Taron Egerton plays Henk Rogers, a shark­skin-suit­ed entre­pre­neur with a chub­by era-defin­ing mous­tache in the gam­ing world of the 1980s who’s on the prowl for the next big hit. Lay­ing his eyes on Tetris at a gam­ing expo and snap­ping up dodgy com­mer­cial rights with a view to sell­ing this peach to Nin­ten­do, his life and com­pa­ny are thrown through a loop when he dis­cov­ers that there are pro­vi­sos in his con­tract, which means he needs to head back to the source.

Fair play to direc­tor Jon S Baird who does his best fan­cy foot­work in try­ing to fun-up a sto­ry which, from all angles, appears to be a doc­u­men­tary try­ing to break out of fic­tion fea­ture cloth­ing. How to liv­en up a bunch of guys with big suits and big­ger accents argu­ing in rooms over the minu­ti­ae of gam­ing rights? Add a bit of red ter­ror intrigue, a pan­tomime vil­lain, some men­ac­ing KGB appa­ratchiks, a dou­ble-deal­ing femme fatale and some glossy 8‑bit visu­als. Yet all that only takes thing so far.

The first half of the film verges on the unbear­ably smug, which feels apt con­sid­er­ing Egerton’s char­ac­ter is a brash, ultra-con­fi­dent wheel­er-deal­er will­ing to put the wel­fare of his fam­i­ly on the table as col­lat­er­al for this mega-sized score. Roger Allam as Robert Maxwell and Antho­ny Boyle as his sniv­el­ling son Kevin score a big fat zero between them for dra­mat­ic nuance. Their cack­ling antag­o­nists both feel like they’ve been draft­ed in from a cheap­jack eight­ies genre film.

The film cer­tain­ly pass­es the time and deliv­ers on its remit in drama­tis­ing this strange and lit­tle-known case. But there’s no ​“why?” in Noah Pink’s pro­ce­dur­al-focused script. As in, why tell this sto­ry now? There’s no real moral cen­tre to the film – it’s a depth-free caper which only demon­strates neg­li­gi­ble inter­est in any wider ram­i­fi­ca­tions of these types of big mon­ey board­room IP raids. It per­haps does even­tu­al­ly speak of the dying days of the Sovi­et Union and how the smoke­screen of com­mu­nism had all but giv­en way to the filthy lucre of the west, but it’s all too lit­tle, too late.

Tetris arrives amid a rash of ​“The Sto­ry of Your Favourite Con­sumer Prod­uct” movies (cf Ben Affleck’s Air, the sto­ry of Air Jor­dans, and Matt Johnson’s Black­ber­ry, the sto­ry of the but­ton-heavy pro­to-smart­phone), and on a lev­el of basic audi­ence empa­thy, it’s not that easy to get excit­ed about see­ing sto­ries that are essen­tial­ly all about the same thing: how a bunch of guys got real­ly rich.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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