Like a B-movie version of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, Max Cloud features a teenage gamer who’s sucked into the world of an old-school video game and must achieve the game’s objectives in order to escape. Director and co-writer Martin Owen is working with a much smaller budget, but he clearly has an affinity for and knowledge of classic 16-bit video games That buys him plenty of goodwill, even if the affable Max Cloud is not particularly engaging (or coherent) as a story. The movie hits plenty of nostalgia buttons for gamers, but that’s the most it has to offer.
In 1990 Brooklyn, teenager Sarah (Isabelle Allen) is obsessed with playing Max Cloud, a video game about the intergalactic adventures of the title character. Her father Tony (Sam Hazeldine), however, doesn’t approve of all the time she spends playing video games, and he attempts to ban them entirely. Just after encountering a strange Easter egg in the game featuring a “space witch,” Sarah makes one of those fateful movie wishes, wishing that she could spend all her time playing video games, and she wakes up the next day to discover that she’s trapped inside the body of Max Cloud character Jake (Elliot James Langridge), the cook on Max’s spaceship.
The limited budget proves to be ideal for recreating the rudimentary aesthetics of an early ’90s video game, including the bright, basic colors of the ship’s interiors and the characters’ uniforms. Max (Scott Adkins) is like a slightly more competent version of Futurama’s Zapp Brannigan, a buffoonish, sexist space ranger with his own self-aggrandizing catch phrase (“Fear is not near, Max Cloud is here”). When Max’s ship crash-lands on the prison planet Heinous, the only survivors are Max, Jake the cook, and Commander Rexy (Sally Collett, also the movie’s co-writer). Sarah-as-Jake bonds with the surprisingly snarky Rexy, and they both attempt to steer Max in the right direction so they can complete the game’s mission and Sarah can return to the real world.
After Sarah’s dad leaves the apartment, her best friend Cowboy (Legends of Tomorrow’s Franz Drameh) shows up, and Sarah is able to communicate with him through the console, telling him that he has to beat the game in order to set her free. There are some amusing bits with Cowboy controlling Jake, causing him to run in circles or bang his head into a wall, but it’s never quite clear how much autonomy the characters have within the game, and how much is Cowboy using the controller to maneuver them. Either way, they must defeat the game’s villain, Revengor (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s John Hannah), as well as his sidekick/enabler, the witch known as Shee (Captain Marvel’s Lashana Lynch).
The mission is a bit scattered, and the motives of space pirate Brock Donnelly (Tommy Flanagan) are confusing, so his sudden arrival and multiple reversals of allegiance don’t really have any impact. Still, Owen gets some decent mileage out of his one-joke premise, putting the actors into familiar video-game scenarios and effectively combining B-movie action star Adkins’ genuine martial-arts prowess with the stilted moves of early video-game fight scenes. Max Cloud cuts back and forth between the in-game action and the real-world scenes of Cowboy playing the game, and the fake 16-bit graphics are lovingly rendered. That allows Owen to occasionally depict what would be a special-effects set piece beyond his budget (a fight against a hulking monster, an attack by giant slugs) solely via the game’s graphics, only cutting to the live actors after the action is over.
That kind of corner-cutting is amusing but also indicative of how thin the plot is, and the attempts at giving the video game characters emotional depth (Max gets a flashback about his childhood love of baking) mostly fail. Even the friendship between real-world teenagers Sarah and Cowboy never connects, since they don’t actually share any screen time until the very end. Adkins seems to be having a good time poking fun at his macho image, and Hannah is entertainingly goofy as Revengor, who is hungry for vengeance but also spends a lot of time complaining about his anxiety and working out to a Jane Fonda-style exercise video.
There’s no good reason for this British production to be set in Brooklyn, and several of the British actors (especially Allen, Hazeldine and Adkins) have trouble with their American accents. That could be part of the movie’s ramshackle charm, or it could be just another indication that Max Cloud is only good for a handful of laughs as a comedy sketch, and isn’t quite up to feature-film standards. The 1980s-style opening-credits fonts, the synth-heavy score, the retro fashions and the Stan Bush songs on the soundtrack conjure up some pleasant neon-colored memories, but they aren’t enough to sustain Max Cloud all the way through the final boss level.
Starring Scott Adkins, Elliot James Langridge, Sally Collett, Franz Drameh, Tommy Flanagan, John Hannah, Lashana Lynch, Isabelle Allen and Sam Hazeldine, Max Cloud is available Friday, Dec. 18 on VOD.