Max Cloud

We all keep a nostalgic glance of our old game consoles on which in our childhood we spent many hours playing and especially escaping. Game consoles such as the Sega Megadrive and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System had a very large toy library at the time, allowing us to face many opponents in battles, but also to play many sports and simulations of all kinds. This way, we kept the many action games in which we had to advance at all costs and face many enemies. This important period in the history of video games is at the very center of Martin Owen's new film (LA Slasher (2015), Killers Anonymous (2019)) in which a teenage girl finds herself immersed in her favorite video game after discovering an interdimensional passage.

Sarah (Isabelle Allen) is a young teenager who spends her free time playing in her bedroom with her game console to a video game that narrates the adventures of Max Cloud, a pilot of an intergalactic space cruiser that crashed with some of his crew on a dangerous planet. When she accidentally opens a portal in her favorite side-scroller, she finds herself trapped in her favorite video game and her avatar must help her favorite hero Max Cloud confront a dangerous criminal and his gang. To escape, she must finish the game with a help from her friend or she will remain a 16-bit character forever. The many twists and turns of the film and her perfectly exploited ideas help to minimize an obvious lack of budget to compete with the American blockbusters.

When discovering this film, one will instantly think of the two Jumanji films by Jake Kasdan with Dwayne Johnson but also of films like Tron and Ready Player One in which an ordinary man finds himself immersed in a video game world in which he will have to do everything to accomplish his mission and stay alive. Martin Owen, co-screenwriter with Sally Collett and director, seems to enjoy revisiting many video games as well, including games such as Streets of Rage, Double Dragon and Morta Kombat, in which we had to face hordes of murderers of all kinds in titanic battles.

The excellent idea of the film makes up for a lack of means allowing the director to go all the way with his ideas and to blow our minds with spectacular special effects. However, he makes up for it by benefiting from one of the best current action movie actors Scott Adkins (also executive producer of this film). The latter in the role of Max Cloud seems to take a real pleasure to embody a hero reminiscent in some ways of Kurt Russel in The Adventures of Jack Burton in the Claws of the Mandarin (Big Trouble in Little China) (1986). A hero who prefers to use his muscles rather than to show his intelligence, which seems here rather limited like many video game characters.

Max Cloud easily imposes itself as one of his good surprises at the end of the year and provided that you like action and science fiction movies of the 80s and 90s and allow the spectators to have a good time. For our part, the presence of Scott Adkins in the lead role is an undeniable attraction to guarantee us perfectly choreographed and quite jubilant action scenes.

Max Cloud
Directed by Martin Owen
Produced by Alan Latham, Thomas Mattinson, Phil McKenzie, Stephen Naulls, Matt Williams
Written by Sally Collett, Martin Owen
Starring Scott Adkins, John Hannah, Lashana Lynch, Elliot James Langridge, Franz Drameh, Isabelle Allen, Sally Collett, Jason Maza, Tommy Flanagan, Sam Hazeldine, Andi Osho, Shirin Daryaie, Martyn Ford, Geraldine Sharrock, Craig Thomas Lambert
Cinematography: Håvard Helle
Edited by Jeremy Gibbs
Release date: December 18, 2020 (United States)
Running time: 88 minutes

Viewed on December 18, 2020

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