Alert for gamers: Tetris isn’t a movie based on a video game you’ve probably played at some point in your gaming life. Tetris deals with a different kind of game: hardball business dealings.
Taron Egerton stars as Henk Rogers, a Dutch-Indonesian entrepreneur who was raised in the US but lives with his wife and kids in Japan.
Rogers discovers the game at a trade show, immediately sees its potential, and spends the rest of the movie trying to license it.
Director Jon S. Baird surrounds Egerton with a strong cast, many of whom play characters who try to thwart Rogers’ ambition.
Toby Jones signs on as Robert Stein, a businessman who thought he had purchased the rights to the game. Roger Allam (as Robert Maxwell) and Anthony Boyle (as Maxwell's son Kevin) further complicate matters as they also jockey for position.
Nikita Efremov plays the Russian programmer who invented the game before the fall of the USSR, an oddly marginal figure when the story begins, mostly because of how the Soviets play the licensing game.
During the Cold War, the state version of Communism dictated that all licensing agreements be made with the Soviet Union, not with individual inventors.
That's why Hank visits Moscow, meets with Soviet bureaucrats, encounters a corrupt Soviet KGB agent, and a translator who seems eager to help.
For Rodgers the stakes are high; he's betting everything he has on emerging victorious.
Tonally, Tetris resembles a spy movie -- only one that revolves around the complex maneuvering of those who seek to work deals with big companies such as Nintendo and Atari.
How true to life is Noah Pink's screenplay? Beats me, but an action-oriented ending including a car chase seems like a stretch, a last-minute attempt to add thriller flourishes
Entertaining in parts, Tetris doesn't totally click as a story about a little guy who's trying to make it big, as a movie about international business, or as a depiction of the final days of the Soviet Union. Tetris seems more like a sidebar to the larger stories that form its backdrop.
On the plus side of the ledger: Egerton's Rogers turns out to be a good-guy hustler whom we root for and animated game-style introductions to various segments help sort things out, at least until they begin to feel repetitive.
And there’s this: Lively and never dull, Tetris could be the only movie I’ve seen recently in which the outcome hinges on the invention of a hand-held device — Nintendo’s Game Boy — that’s not designed to blow anything up.
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