Final Rating: 1.5./5
There are scattered good moments in Dickson Leung’s e-sports drama Good Game, but they’re undercut by sloppy filmmaking that leaves the film feeling unfinished.
In Good Game, disgraced e-sports athlete Solo is recruited by Tai, the owner of failing internet café Happy Hour, to lead a rag-tag group of gamers to victory in a national tournament. In only a few short weeks, Solo must train his group of unlikely amateurs and overcome his own ego to have any hope of winning against ER Killers, one of the top e-sports teams in Hong Kong.
Good Game’s stereotypical underdog story makes room for endearing characters. Solo learns to let go of his ego in favour of supporting his team. Tai bonds with his daughter Fay – who is also part of the team – over gaming, as Fay brings her divorced parents closer together. Octo, the fourth member of Happy Hour, struggles with his wife’s health issues while rediscovering a lifelong passion. The ER Killers’ team captain Vava used to idolize Solo and is now conflicted about facing off against him. The actors give competent performances that hit all the right notes, but not much more.
Unfortunately, competent performances do little to save the movie from the myriad of seeming mistakes and boring directorial choices. Most notable is the sound. From the soundtrack to the sound effects, Good Game feels either lazy, or like a working cut of the final film. At several points, sound effects are just… missing. A scene late in the film shows a character being punched repeatedly, the fists connecting in complete silence. A cut only minutes later pans to a cheering audience, all shouting at decibels below a low whisper.
Songs from the soundtrack will regularly skip ahead, skip back, or change without any kind of transition. At least one song stops entirely for a minute – with no clear reason for silence – only to pick up where it left off. The songs sound like stock music, and are usually melodically or tonally out of place in the film.
Even the first frame of the film feels like a placeholder: the film opens with a quote attributed to Deepseek (an AI model popular in China) which defines “Good Game,” a phrase spoken by players in e-sports after their team has lost.
Good Game has a more serious flaw: the game at the centre of the conflict doesn’t make much sense.
The game’s goals are never quite clear, the team members’ roles are never quite clear, and it’s hard to root for any team, because it’s hard to know what it means to win in the first place. More often, the game is an excuse to switch out the actors for stunt people in colourful clothes and depict them fighting – as opposed to seeing the main characters staring at a screen the whole time. The stunt people do great stunts and the gaming scenes are inventively filmed, though
Good Game is not a good movie. In fairness, it’s most likely not a finished movie, either.
Thank you to Fantasia Festival for the screener.
