Kingsman: The Secret Service, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Billionaire Boys Club, the absolutely vile Robin Hood and the slow-paced (except for the opening 40 minutes) Rocketman…I’ve never liked and have mostly hated films starring Taron Egerton. I’m therefore reluctant to see anything he’s starring in.
From Brian Tallerico’s 3.16 review of Jon S. Baird and Noah Pink‘s Tetris (Apple, 3.31):
“Egerton stars as Henk Rogers, the founder of a company called Bullet-Proof Software, and a man who basically stumbled into the legacy of Tetris at a gaming convention in his new home country of Japan. He instantly realizes the potential of a game that had yet to make its way around the Iron Curtain to any part of the world other than Tokyo. And he wants a piece of it.
“Rogers narrates Tetris, a complicated film about a simple game. It’s just a rolling array of dropping blocks, but the details about market shares, legal rights, and Cold War politics drive this plot, not the game itself. Rogers is a low-level player in the gaming world, and getting the rights to something as Tetris will require navigating around power figures in both business and politics.
“It sounds like a lot, and yet it’s also not enough. All of this intrigue and negotiation gets Tetris to a remarkably repetitive and monotonous place that’s not helped by director Jon S. Baird’s glib tone, one that looks back on the ‘80s with a sort of goofy bemusement that feels disingenuous. The movie bounces back and forth between conference rooms and scary Russian alleys, but it never finds the right depth of character or deviation in either, choosing to enliven the dry material with an odd amount of condescension instead of actual tension. “Can you believe these crazy Russians?” is an odd tone to strike, especially with the current state of the world in 2023.
“The saddest thing about Tetris is that it’s easy to see why someone wanted to tell this story. The little guy never wins in Russia, and he usually goes to jail for even thinking he could play, but American business is built on narratives of Davids beating business Goliaths. Merging the two for a story in which an ambitious American had to use the tools of Capitalism to topple Communism sounds like an easy sell, and there’s probably a great documentary to be made on this subject. But breaking it out into a drama or thriller requires a different set of rules, and, despite Egerton’s best efforts, the team behind “Tetris” never figured out how to tell this story.”