It’s funny to see what happens whenever a character first plays Tetris in the new movie “Tetris.” Two young girls, testing the game out at home, fall into a hushed kind of trance. Hiroshi Yamauchi (Togo Igawa), the famously poker-faced president of Nintendo, sets down his joystick and declares it “not bad” (high praise). And Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton), a mega-ambitious video game entrepreneur who spies an early demo at a 1988 Vegas consumer electronics show, is so transfixed by those flipping, falling four-square pieces that they end up haunting his dreams. Maybe you’ll relate. Watching character after character succumb to Tetris’ spell, I certainly wanted nothing more than to cast everything aside — “Tetris” included — and go a few rounds with the game myself.
I have since done exactly that, and I’ll likely go a few more once I’ve finished my review and surrendered my obligations to think about this semi-diverting, curiously underwhelming movie. Don’t get me wrong: The disappointment of “Tetris” is not that it fails to reproduce the pleasures of an ingeniously simple, insanely addictive puzzle game. It’s more that the movie seems at a loss for how to play its own material. In teasing out Tetris’ convoluted Soviet-era origins, it tries, with only fitful success, to fit a series of disparate, fast-moving parts into a pleasingly coherent shape. The mix of busy comic exaggeration, affectionate ‘80s nostalgia trip and gloomy mid-perestroika history lesson never comes together.
Slickly directed by Jon S. Baird (“Stan & Ollie”) from a strenuous, back-flipping script by Noah Pink, “Tetris” focuses not on how the game was invented — in 1984, by a genial Soviet mathematician and computer whiz named Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov) — but rather how it made its way out from behind the Iron Curtain and into eager hands worldwide. The result is a kind of Cold War-era Cinderella story for arcade junkies, in which Tetris finds an improbable Prince Charming in Nintendo (and specifically, Nintendo’s massively successful Game Boy handheld console) and becomes an unwitting harbinger of Soviet defeat, allowing Henk and other proud beneficiaries to live capitalistically ever after.
Henk is the eager-to-please hero of this eager-to-please movie, and Egerton plays him with a polished corporate-bedside manner, an eager-beaver mustache and enough warm, gregarious energy to almost neutralize your double take when he describes himself as being of partly Indonesian descent. Egerton is a strong, hard-working actor (see: “Rocketman,” the “Kingsman” movies), but this particular suspension of disbelief — maybe too polite a euphemism for a case of standard-issue Hollywood whitewashing — is tough to pull off in a story where cultural specificities are not exactly irrelevant.