I have no idea who Scott Adkins is, but all the other reviewers seem to have a negative opinion of his interpretation of his role... I don't understand this, not only did he have fun playing a silly video game character, mid-movie we learn that his character has a super cute back-story (stupid, sure, but that's the point! I was completely captured!)
So about the movie, it was a pastiche of the 80s/90s movies. The story is between Jumanji and that movie where two kids bring a hot chick alive through a TV, I just can't remember the title. Which is fine, those movies were forgettable, but still fun!
The pastiche works, the game character's presence and jokes are... wooden, and that's by design. The game, when shown as an SNES game, is awesome. Meanwhile, inside the game, the characters do and say stuff that's deeper than the arcade game they're in. That's absolutely awesome. There's a nod to printed game guides, character back stories, and all of that eventually completes the immersion. I've developed a game in my time and to me it was absolutely awesome seeing the discrepancy between what the sprite-based characters did in an arcade-style game, compared to a 80s/90s developer's idea of what the character actually was about. I won't mark this as spoiler, but you'll see what I mean when the time comes. And believe me, it's awesome through that lens.
I't's a B movie and it's aware of it, making the best of it. It's a pastiche of a tiny sub-genre of 80s/90s movies, so maybe not for everyone. But if you're in the right mindset, you will enjoy it. And hats off the the people who created the pixel art for the game, that was actually amazing and completely transparent, as opposed to the spaceship CGI which was obviously (but very consciously) crap ;)
